
Book ___ 

Copyright^? 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSiE 



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JTamotts Wamtn. 



GEORGE SAND. 



// 



The next volumes in the Famous Women Series 
will be: 

Margaret Fuller. By Julia Ward Howe. 
Mary Lamb. By Mrs. Gilchrist. 
Maria Edgeworth. By Miss Zimmern. 

Already published : 

George Eliot. By Miss Blind. 
Emily Bronte. By Miss Robinson. 
George Sand. By Miss Thomas. 




George Sand. 



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BY 



BERTHA THOMAS. 



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BOSTON: 

ROBERTS BROTHERS. 

1883. 



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Copyright, 1888, 
By Roberts Brothers. 



University Press : 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



PREFATORY NOTE. 



The authentic materials available for an account 
of the life of George Sand, although lately in- 
creased by the publication of a large part of 
her correspondence, are still incomplete. Her 
memoirs by her own hand, dealing fully with 
her early life alone, remain unsupplemented by 
any entire and detailed biography, for which, 
indeed, the time seems hardly yet come. 
Hence one among many obvious difficulties in 
the way of this attempt to prepare for English 
readers a brief sketch that shall at least indi- 
cate all the more salient features of a life of 
singularly varied aspect. 

Much, though of interest in itself, must here 
be omitted, as beyond the scope of the present 
study. There are points again into which, as 
touching persons still living or quite recently 



VI PRE FA TOR Y NO TE. 

deceased, it would be premature to enter. But 
none seem of such importance as to forbid the 
endeavor, by a careful review of those facts in 
the life of George Sand which most justly repre- 
sent her character as a whole, and were the 
determining influences on her career and on 
her work, to arrive at truth and completeness 
of general outline, the utmost it is possible to 
hope to accomplish in this little volume. 

Bertha Thomas. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I. 

PAGE. 

Early Years i 



CHAPTER II. 
Girlhood and Married Life .... 29 

CHAPTER III. 
Debut in Literature 54 

CHAPTER IV, 
Lelia — Italian Journey 79 

CHAPTER V. 
Mental Development ..... 104 

CHAPTER VI. 
Solitude, Society and Socialism . . .127 



Vlil CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER VII. 

PAGE. 

Consuelo — Home Life at Nohant . . 149 

CHAPTER VIII. 
Novelist and Politician . . . . . 170 

CHAPTER IX. 
Pastoral Tales .192 

CHAPTER X. 
Plays and later Novels 213 

CHAPTER XI. 
Artist and Moralist 238 

CHAPTER XII. 
Later Years 256 



GEORGE SAND. 



CHAPTER I. 

EARLY YEARS. 

In naming George Sand we name something 
more exceptional than even a great genius. Her 
rise to eminence in the literature of her century, 
is, if not without a parallel, yet absolutely with- 
out a precedent, in the annals of women of 
modern times. 

The origin of much that is distinctive in the 
story of her life may be traced in the curious 
story of her lineage. 

George Sand was of mixed national descent, 
and in her veins ran the blood of heroes and of 
kings. The noble and the artist, the bourgeoisie 
and the people, all had their representa- 
tives among their immediate ancestors. Her 
grandmother, the guardian of her girlhood, was 
the child of Maurice, Marshal Saxe, that favor- 
ite figure in history and romance, himself son 
of the famous Augustus II., Elector of Saxony, 



2 GEORGE SAND. 

and King of Poland, and the Swedish Countess 
Aurora von Konigsmark. The Marshal's 
daughter Aurore, though like her father of ille- 
gitimate birth — her mother, who was connected 
with the stage, passed by her professional name 
of Mile. Verrieres — obtained after the Mar- 
shal's death the acknowledgment and protection 
of his relatives in high places, notably of his 
niece, the Dauphin of France, grand-daughter 
of Augustus of Poland, and mother of the 
three kings — Louis XVI., Louis XVIII., and 
Charles X. 

Carefully educated at St. Cyr, Mile, de Saxe 
was married, when little more than a child, to 
the Count de Horn, who was also of partly 
royal but irregular origin. He very shortly 
afterward fell in a duel. His widow, at thirty, 
became the wife of M. Dupin de Frajicueil, an 
old gentleman of good provincial family and 
some fortune. Maurice, their only child, was 
the father of George Sand. 

Madame Dupin (the suffix de Franceuil was 
afterwards dropped by her husband ) appears to 
have inherited none of the adventurous and 
erratic tendencies of her progenitors. Aristo- 
cratic in her sympathies, philosophic in her 
intellect, and strictly decorous in her conduct, 
throughout the whole of her long and checkered 
life she was regarded with respect. Left a 



EARLY YEARS. 3 

widow again, ten years after her second mar- 
riage, she concentrated her hopes and affections 
on her handsome and amiable son Maurice. 
Though fondly attached to her, he was yet to be 
the cause of her heaviest sorrows, by his more 
than hazardous marriage, and by his premature 
and tragical fate. 

His strongest natural leanings seem to have 
been towards art in general, music and the 
drama in particular, and of his facile, buoyant, 
artist temperament there is ample evidence ; 
but the political conditions of France under the 
Directory in 1798 left him no choice but to 
enter the army, where he served under Dupont, 
winning his commission on the field of Marengo 
in 1800. It was during this Italian campaign 
that the young officer met with the woman 
who, four years later, became his wife, and the 
mother of his illustrious child. 

Mademoiselle Sophie Victorie Delaborde, 
was, emphatically speaking, a daughter of the 
people. Her father had been a poor bird-seller 
at Paris, where she herself had worked as a 
milliner. Left unprotected at a very early age, 
thoroughly uneducated and undisciplined, gifted 
with considerable beauty, and thrown on the 
world at a time when the very foundations of 
society seemed to be collapsing, she had been 
exposed to extreme dangers, and without any of 



4 . GEORGE SAND. 

the ordinary safeguards against them. That 
she proved herself not undeserving of the seri- 
ous attachment with which she inspired Maurice 
Dupin, her least favorable judges were after- 
wards forced to admit ; though, at the time this 
infatuation of the lieutenant of six-and-twenty 
for one four years his senior, and of the hum- 
blest extraction, and whose life hitherto had not 
been blameless, was naturally regarded as 
utterly disastrous by his elders. 

The devoted pair were married secretly at 
Paris in 1804; and on the 5th of July in the same 
year — the last of the French Republic and the 
first of the Empire — their daughter entered the 
world, receiving the name of Amantine-Lucile- 
Aurore. 

The discovery of the mesalliance she had been 
dreading for some time, and which her son had 
not dared to confess to her, was a heavy blow 
to old Madame Dupin! However, she schooled 
herself to forgive what was irrevocable, and to 
acknowledge this most unwelcome daughter-in- 
law, the infant Aurore helping unconsciously to 
effect the reconciliation. But for more than 
three years M. Dupin's mother and his wife 
scarcely ever met. Madame Dupin mere was 
living in a retired part of the country, in the 
very centre of France, on the little property of 
Nohant, which she had bought with what the 



EARLY YEARS. 5 

Revolution had left her out of her late hus- 
band's fortune. Maurice, now Captain Dupin 
and aide-de-camp to Murat, resided, when 
not on service, in Paris, where he had 
settled with his wife and child. The 
union, strange though it may se'em, continued 
to be a happy one. Besides a strong attach- 
ment there existed a real conformity of dis- 
position between the two. The mother of 
George Sand was also, in her way, a remarkable 
woman. She has been described by her daugh- 
ter as " a great artist lost for want of develop- 
ment " ; showing a wonderful dexterity in what- 
ever she put her hand to, no matter if practiced 
in it or not. " She tried everything, and always 
succeeded " — sewing, drawing, tuning the piano 
— " she would have made shoes, locks, furniture, 
had it been necessary." But her tastes were 
simple and domestic. Though married out of 
her rank, she was entirely without any vain 
ambition to push herself into fashionable so- 
ciety, the constraint of which, moreover, she 
could not bear. " She was a woman for the 
fire-side, or for quick, merry walks and drives. 
But in the house or out of doors, what she 
wanted was intimacy and confidence, complete 
sincerity in her relations with those around her, 
absolute liberty in her habits and the disposal 
of her time. She always led a retired life, more 



6 GEORGE SAND. 

anxious to keep aloof from tiresome acquain- 
tance than to seek such as might be advan- 
tageous. That was just the foundation of my 
father's character ; and in this respect never was 
there a better-assorted couple. They could 
never be happy except in their own little 
menage. Everywhere out of it they had to 
stifle their melancholy yawns, and they have 
transmitted to me that secret shyness which has 
always made the gay world intolerable, and 
home a necessity to me." 

In a modest bourgeois habitation in the Rue 
Meslay, afterwards transferred to the Rue 
Grange-Bat eliere, Aurore Dupin's infancy passed 
tranquilly away, under the wing of her warmly 
affectionate mother who, though utterly illiter- 
ate, showed intuitive tact and skill in fostering 
the child's intelligence. "Mine," says her 
daughter, " made no resistance ; but was never 
beforehand with anything, and might have 
been very much behindhand if left to itself." 

Aurore was not four years old when adven- 
tures began for her in earnest. In the spring 
of 1808, her father was at Madrid, in atten- 
dance upon Murat ; and Madame Maurice 
Dupin, becoming impatient of prolonged sepa- 
ration from her husband, started off with her 
little girl to join him. The hazards and hard- 
ships of the expedition, long mountain drives 



EARLY YEARS. 7 

and wild scenery, strange fare and strange 
sights, could not fail vividly to impress the 
child, whose imagination from her cradle was 
extraordinarily active. Her mother ere this 
had discovered that Aurore, then little more 
than a baby, and pent up within four chairs to 
keep her out of harm's way, would make her- 
self perfectly happy, plucking at the basket- 
work and babbling endless fairy tales to her- 
self, confused and diluted versions of the first 
fictions narrated to her. A picturesque line in 
a nursery song was enough to bring before her 
a world of charming wonders ; the figures, 
birds, and flowers on a Sevres china candela- 
brum would call up enchanting landscapes ; and 
the sound of a flageolet played from some dis-- 
tant attic start a train of melodious fancies and 
throw her into musical raptures. Her daily 
experiences, after reaching Madrid with her 
mother, continued to be novel and exciting in 
the extreme. The palace of the Prince de la 
Paix, where Murat and his suite had their 
quarters, was to her the realization of the 
wonder-land of Perrault and d' Aulnoy ; Murat, 
the veritable Prince Fanfarinet. She was pre- 
sented to him in a fancy court-dress, devised for 
the occasion by her mother, an exact imitation 
of her father's uniform in miniature, with spurs, 
sword, and boots, all complete. The Prince 



8 GEORGE SAND. 

was amused by the jest, and took a fancy to the 
child, calling her his little aide-de-camp. After 
a residence of several weeks in this abode, whose 
splendor was alloyed by not a little discomfort 
and squalor, the return-journey had to be accom- 
plished in the height of summer, amid every 
sort of risk ; past reeking battle-fields, camps, 
sacked and half-burnt villages and beleaguered 
cities. Captain Dupin succeeded, however, in 
escorting his family safely back into France 
again, the party halting to recruit awhile under 
his mother's roof. 

Nohant, a spot that has become as famous 
through its associations as Abbotsford, lies 
about three miles from the little town of La 
Chatre, in the department of the Indre, part of 
the old province of Berry. The manor is a 
plain gray house with steep mansard roofs, of 
the time of Louis XVI. It stands just apart 
from the road, shaded by trees, beside a pleasure 
ground of no vast extent, but with its large 
flower-garden and little wood allowed to spread 
at nature's bidding, quite in the English style. 
Behind the house cluster a score of cottages of 
the scattered hamlet of Nohant ; in the centre 
rises the smallest of churches, with a tiny 
cemetery hedged around and adjoining the wall 
of the manor garden. 

At this country home the tired travellers 



EARLY YEARS. 9 

gladly alighted ; but they had barely a few weeks 
in which to recover from the fatigues of their 
Spanish campaign, when a terrible calamity 
overwhelmed the household. Maurice Dupin, 
riding home one night from La Chatre, was 
thrown from his horse and killed on the spot. 

The story of Aurore Dupin's individual life 
opens at once with the death of her father — a 
loss she was still too young to comprehend, but 
for which she was soon to suffer through the 
strange, the anomalous position, in which it was 
to place her. Maurice Dupin's patrician mother 
and her plebeian daughter-in-law, bereft thus 
violently of him who had been the only possible 
link between them, found themselves hope- 
lessly, actively, and increasingly at variance. 
Their tempers clashed, their natures were anti- 
pathetic, their views contradictory, their posi- 
tions irreconcilable. Aurore was not only 
thrust into an atmosphere of strife, but con- 
demned to the apple of discord. She was to 
grow up between two hostile camps, each claim- 
ing her obedience and affection. 

The beginning was smooth, and the sadness 
which alone kept the peace was not allowed to 
weigh on the child. She ran wild in the gar- 
den, the country air and country life strength- 
ening a naturally strong constitution ; and her 
intelligence, though also allowed much freedom 



IO GEORGE SAND. 

in its development, was not neglected. A pre- 
ceptor was on the spot in the person of the 
fourth inmate of Nohant, an old pedagogue, 
Deschartres by name, formerly her father's 
tutor, who had remained in Madame Dupin's 
service as "intendant." The serio-comic figure 
of this personage, so graphically drawn by 
George Sand herself in the memoirs of her 
early life, will never be forgotten by any reader 
of those reminiscences. Pedant, she says, was 
written in every line of his countenance and 
every movement that he made. He was pos- 
sessed of some varied learning, much narrow 
prejudice, and a violent, crotchety temper, but 
had proved during the troubles of the Revolu- 
tion his sincere and disinterested devotion to 
the family he served, and Aurore and "the 
great man," as she afterwards nicknamed her 
old tutor, were always good friends. 

Before she was four years old she could read 
quite well ; but she remarks that it was only 
after learning to write that what she read be- 
gan to take a definite meaning for her. The 
fairy-tales perused but half intelligently before 
were re-read with a new delight. She learnt 
grammar with Deschartres, and from her grand- 
mother took her first lessons in music, an art of 
which she became passionately fond ; and it 
always remained for her a favourite source of 



EARLY YEARS. II 

enjoyment, though she never acquired much 
proficiency as a musical performer. The edu- 
cational doctrines of Rousseau had then 
brought into fashion a regime of open-air exer- 
cise and freedom for the young, such as we 
commonly associate with English, rather than 
French, child-life ; and Aurore's early years — 
when domestic hostilities and nursery tyran- 
nies, from which, like most sensitive children, 
she suffered inordinately, were suspended — 
were passed in the careless, healthy fashion 
approved in this country. A girl of her own 
age, but of lower degree, was taken into the 
house to share her studies and pastimes. Little 
Ursule was to become, in later years, the faith- 
ful servant of her present companion, who had 
then become lady of the manor, and who never 
lost sight of this humble friend. Aurore had 
also a boy playmate in a protegJ of her grand- 
mother's, five years her senior, who patronised 
and persecuted her by turns, in his true fra- 
ternal fashion. This boy, Hippolyte, the son of 
a woman of low station, was in fact Aurore's 
half-brother, adopted from his birth and brought 
up by Madame Dupin the elder, whose indul- 
gence, where her son was concerned, was in- 
finite. With these, and the children of the 
farm-tenants and rural proprietors around, 
Aurore did not want for companions. But the 



12 GEORGE SAND. 

moment soon arrived when the painful family- 
dispute of which she was the object, was to be- 
come the cause of more distress to the child 
than to her elders. There were reasons which 
stood in the way of Madame Maurice Dupin's 
fixing her residence permanently under her 
mother-in-law's roof. But the mind of the latter 
was set on obtaining the guardianship of her 
grand-daughter, the natural heir to her prop- 
erty, and on thus assuring to her social and 
educational privileges of a superior order. The 
child's heart declared unreservedly for her 
mother, whose passionate fondness she re- 
turned with the added tenderness of a deeper 
nature, and all attempts to estrange the two 
had only drawn them closer together. But the 
pecuniary resources of Maurice Dupin's widow 
were of the smallest, and the advantages offered 
to her little girl by the proposed arrangement 
so material, that the older lady gained her 
point in the end. Madame Maurice settled in 
Paris. Aurore grew up her grandmother's 
ward, with Nohant for her home ; a home she 
was to keep, knowing no other, till the end of 
her life. 

The separation was brought about very 
gradually to the child. The first few winters 
were spent in Paris, where her grandmother 
had an establishment'. Then she could pass 



EARLY YEARS. 1 3 

whole days with her mother, who, in turn, spent 
summers at Nohant, and Aurore for years was 
buoyed up by the hope that a permanent re- 
union would still be brought about. But mean- 
time domestic jealousy and strife, inflamed by 
the unprincipled meddling of servants, raged 
more fiercely than ever, and could not but be a 
source of more than ordinary childish misery to 
their innocent object. It was but slowly that 
she became attached to her grandmother, whose 
undemonstrative temper, formal habits and con- 
descending airs were little calculated to win 
over her young affections, or fire her with grati- 
tude for the anxiety displayed by this guardian 
to form her manners and cultivate her intellect. 
Nay, the result was rather to implant in her a 
premature dislike and distrust for conventional 
ideals. From the standard of culture and pro- 
priety, from the temptations of social rank and 
wealth held up for her preference, she instinct- 
ively turned to the simple, unrestrained affec- 
tion of the despised mother, and the greater 
freedom and expansion enjoyed in such com- 
pany. In vain did disdainful lady's-maids try 
to taunt her into precocious worldly wisdom, 
asking if she could really want to go and eat 
beans in a little garret. Such a condition, 
naturally, she began to regard as the equivalent 
of a noble and glorious existence ! 



14 GEORGE SAND, 

Meantime, throughout all these alternations 
of content and distress, Nohant and its sur- 
roundings were perforce becoming dear to her, 
as only the home of our childhood can ever be- 
come. The scenery and characteristics of that 
region are familiar to all readers of the works of 
George Sand ; a quiet region of narrow, wind- 
ing, shady lanes, where you may wander long 
between the tall hedges without meeting a liv- 
ing creature but the wild birds that start from 
the honey-suckle and hawthorn, and the frogs 
croaking among the sedges ; a region of soft- 
flowing rivers with curlew-haunted reed beds, 
and fields where quails cluck in the furrows ; 
the fertile plain studded with clumps of ash 
and alder, and a rare farm - habitation stand- 
ing amid orchards and hemp - fields, or a 
rarer hamlet of a dozen cottages grouped 
together. The country is flat, and, viewed 
from the rail or high road, unimpressive. 
But those fruitful fields have a placid beauty, 
and it needs but to penetrate the sequestered 
lanes and explore the thicket-bound courses of 
the streams, to meet with plenty of those pleas- 
ant "solitudes after a poet's own heart, whose gift 
is to seize and perpetuate transient effects, and 
to open the eyes of duller minds to charms that 
might pass unnoticed. In this sense only can 
George Sand be said to have idealized for us 
the landscapes she loved. 



EARLY YEARS. 1 5 

The thoughtful, poetic side of her tempera- 
ment showed itself early, leading her to seek 
long intervals of solitude, when she would bury 
herself in books or dreams, to satisfy the crav- 
ings of her intellect and imagination. On the 
other hand, her vigorous physical organization 
kept alive her taste for active amusements and 
merry companionship. So the child-squire 
romped on equal terms with the little rustics 
of Nohant, sharing their village sports and the 
occupations of the seasons as they came round : 
hay-making and gleaning in summer ; in winter 
weaving bird-nets to spread in the snowy fields 
for the wholesale capture of larks ; anon listen- 
ing with mixed terror and delight to the pictur- 
esque legends told by the hemp-beaters, as they 
sat at their work out of doors on September 
moonlight evenings — to all the traditional 
ghost-stories of the "Black Valley," as she 
fancifully christened the country round about. 
Tales were these of fantastic animals and gob- 
lins, the grand' -bete and the levrette blanche, 
Georgeon, that imp of mischief, night appari- 
tions of witches and charmers of wolves, sing- 
ing Druidical stones and mysterious portents — 
a whole fairy mythology, then firmly believed in 
by the superstitious peasantry. 

As a signal contrast to this way of life came 
for a time the annual visits to Paris — suspended 



1 6 GEORGE SAND. 

after she was ten years old. There liberty 
ended, and the girl was transported into a novel 
and most uncongenial sphere. Her grand- 
mother's friends and relatives were mostly old 
people, who clung to antiquated modes and 
customs ; and distinguished though such circles 
might be, the youngest member only found out 
that they were intolerably dull. The wrinkled 
countesses with their elaborate toilettes and 
ceremonious manners, the abbes with their fash- 
ionable tittle-tattle and their innumerable snuff- 
boxes, the long dinners, the accomplishment- 
lessons, notably those in dancing and deport- 
ment, were repugnant to the soul of the little 
hoyden. She made amends to herself by observ- 
ing these new scenes and characters narrowly, 
with the acute natural perception that was one 
of her leading gifts. From this artificial atmo- 
sphere of constraint, it was inevitable that she 
should welcome hours of escape into her 
mother's unpretending domestic circle ; .and 
already at ten years old she had pronounced 
the lot of a scullery-maid enviable, compared to 
that of an old marquise. 

Nevertheless the fact of her having, at an age 
when impressions are strongest, and most last- 
ing, mixed freely and on equal terms with the 
upper classes of society, was a point in her edu- 
cation not without its favorable action on her 



EARLY YEARS. 1 7 

afterwards as a novelist. Despite her firm re- 
publican sympathies, emphatic disdain for mere 
rank and wealth, and her small mercy for the 
foibles of the fashionable world, she can enter 
into its spirit, paint its allurements without 
exaggeration, and indicate its shortcomings with 
none of that asperity of the outsider which 
always suggests some unconscious envy lurking 
behind the scorn. 

The despised accomplishment -lessons, in 
themselves tending only to so much agree- 
able dabbling, proved useful to her indirectly 
by creating new interests, and as an intellect- 
ual stimulus. There seems to have been little 
or no method about her early education. The 
study of her own language was neglected, and 
the time spent less profitably, she considered in 
acquiring a smattering of Latin with Deschar- 
tres. She took to some studies with avidity, 
while others remained wholly distasteful to her. 
For mere head-work she cared little. Arithme- 
tic she detested ; versification, no less. Her 
imagination rebelled against the restrictions of 
form. Nowhere, perhaps, except in the free- 
fantasia style of the novel, could this great prose- 
poet have found the right field in which to do 
justice to her powers. The dry technique in 
music was a stumbling-block of which she was 
impatient. History and literature she enjoyed 



1 8 GEORGE SAND. 

in whatever they offered that was romantic, 
heroic, or poetically suggestive. In her No- 
hant surroundings there was nothing to check, 
and much to stimulate, this dominant, imagin- 
ative faculty. Her youthful attempts at original 
composition she quickly discarded in disgust ; 
but it seemed almost a law of her mind that 
whatever was possessing it she must instinct- 
ively weave into a romance. Thus in writing 
her history-epitome she must improve on the 
original, when too dry, by exercising her fancy 
in the description of places and personages. 
The actual political events of that period were of 
the most exciting character ; Napoleon's Russian 
campaign, abdication, retreat to Elba, the Hun- 
dred Days, Waterloo, the Restoration, following 
each other in swift succession. Old Madame 
Dupin was an anti-Bonapartist, but Aurore had 
caught from her mother something of the popu- 
lar infatuation for the emperor, and her fancy 
would create him over again, as he might have 
been had his energies been properly directed. 
Her day-dreams were often so vivid as to effect 
her senses with all the force of realities. 

Such a visionary life might have been most 
dangerous and mentally enervating had her or- 
ganization been less robust, and the tendency 
to reverie not been matched by lively external 
perception and plentiful physical activity. As 



EARLY YEARS. 1 9 

it was, if at one moment she was in a cloud-land of 
her own, or poring over the stories of the Iliad, 
the classic mythologies, or Tasso's Gernsalemme, 
the next would see her scouring the fields with 
Ursule and Hippolyte, playing practical jokes 
on the tutor, and extemporizing wild out-of-door 
games and dances with her village companions. 
Of serious religious education she received 
none at all. Here, again, the authorities were 
divided. Her mother was pious in a primitive 
way, though holding aloof from priestly influ- 
ences. The grandmother, a disciple of Jean- 
Jacques Rousseau and of Voltaire, had re- 
nounced the Catholic creed, and was what was 
then called a Deist. But beyond discouraging 
a belief in miraculous agencies she preserved a 
neutrality with her ward on the subject, and 
Aurore was left free to drift as her nature should 
decide. Instinctively she felt more drawn 
toward her mother's unreasoning, emotional 
faith than toward a system of philosophic, criti- 
cal inquiry. But on both sides what was offered 
her to worship was too indefinite to satisfy her 
strong religious instincts. Once more she filled 
in the blank with her imagination, which was 
forthwith called upon to picture a being who 
should represent all perfections, human and di- 
vine ; something that her heart could love, as 
well as her intelligence approve. 



20 GEORGE SAND. 

This ideal figure, for whom she devised the 
name Corambe, was to combine all the spiritual 
qualities of the Christian ideal with the earthly 
grace and beauty of the mythological deities of 
Greece. For very many years she cherished 
this fantasy, finding there the scope she sought 
for her aspirations after superhuman excellence. 
It is hardly too much to say that the Christian- 
ity which had been expressly left out in her 
teaching she invented for herself. She erected 
a woodland altar in the recesses of a thicket to 
this imaginary object of her adoration, and it is 
a characteristic trait that the sacrifices she 
chose to offer there were the release of birds 
and butterflies that had been taken prisoners — 
as a symbolical oblation most welcome to a di- 
vinity whose essential attributes were infinite 
mercy and love. It will be remembered that a 
somewhat similar anecdote is related of the 
youthful Goethe. 

Aurore, as the years went on, had grown sin- 
cerely fond of Madame Dupin ; but her mother 
still held the foremost place in her heart, and 
she had never ceased to cherish the belief that 
if they two^ could live together she would be 
perfectly happy. The discovery of this deeply 
irritated her grandmother, who at length was 
provoked to intimate to the girl something of 
the real motive for insisting on this separation 



EARLY YEARS. 21 

— namely, that her mother's antecedents were 
such as, in the eyes of Aurore's well-wishers, ren- 
dered it desirable to establish the daughter's ex- 
istence apart from that of her parent. Sooner 
or later such a revelation must have been made ; 
but made as it was, thus precipitately, in a mo- 
ment of jealous anger, the chief result was of 
necessity to cause a painful and dangerous shock 
to the sensitive young mind. It brought about 
an unnatural discord in her moral nature, forbid- 
den all at once to respect what she had loved most, 
and must continue to love, in spite of all. On 
the injurious effects of the over-agitation to 
which she was subjected in her childhood she 
has laid much stress in her remarkable work, 
"The Story of My Life." Much of this book, 
written when she was between forty and fifty, 
reads like a romance ; and had a certain amount 
of retrospective imagination entered into the 
treatment of these reminiscences it would not 
be surprising. The tendency to impart poetical 
color and significance to whatever was capable 
of taking it was her mastering impulse, and may 
sometimes have led her to lose the distinction 
between fancy and reality, especially as by her 
own confession her memory was never her 
strong point. But she had an excellent memory 
for impressions, and no reader whose own recol- 
lections of childhood have not grown faint, but 



22 GEORGE SAND. 

will feel the profound truth of the spirit of the 
narrative, which is of a kind that occasional ex- 
aggerations in the letter cannot depreciate in 
value as a psychological history. For an account 
of her early life it must always 'remain the most 
important source. 

Aurore was now thirteen, and though she had 
read a good deal of miscellaneous literature her 
instruction had been mostly of a desultory sort ; 
she was behindhand in the accomplishments 
deemed desirable for young ladies ; and her 
country manners, on the score of etiquette, left 
something to be desired. To school, therefore, 
it was decided that she must go ; and her grand- 
mother selected that held by the nuns of the 
" English convent " at Paris, as the most fash- 
ionable institution of the kind. 

This Convent des Anglaises was a British 
community, first established in the French capi- 
tal in Cromwell's time. It has now been re- 
moved, and its site, the Rue St. Victor, has 
undergone complete transformation. In 1817, 
however, it was in high repute among conven- 
tual educational establishments. To this re- 
treat Aurore was consigned and there spent 
more than two years, an untroubled time she 
has spoken of as in many respects the happiest 
of her life. There is certainly nothing more 
delightful in her memoirs than the vivid picture 



EARLY YEARS. 2$ 

there drawn of the convent-school interior, 
drawn without flattery or malice, and with 
sympathy and animation. 

The nunnery was an extensive building of 
rambling construction — with parts disused and 
dilapidated — quite a little settlement, counting 
some 150 inmates, nuns, pupils and teachers; 
with cells, and dormitories, long corridors, chap- 
els, kitchens, distillery, spiral staircases and 
mysterious nooks and corners ; a large garden 
planted with chestnut trees, a kitchen garden, 
and a little cemetery without gravestones, over- 
grown with evergreens and flowers. The sisters 
were all English, Irish, or Scotch, but the 
majority of the pupils and the secular mis- 
tresses were French. Of the nuns the ex- 
scholar speaks with respect and affection, but 
their religious exercises left them but the 
smaller share of their time and attention to 
devote to the pupils. The girls almost without 
exception were of high social rank, the bourgeois 
element as yet having scarcely penetrated this 
exclusive seminary. Aurore formed warm friend- 
ships with many of her school-fellows, and seems 
to have been decidedly popular with the author- 
ities as well, in spite of the high spirits which 
amid congenial company found vent in harmless 
mischief and a sort of organized playful in- 
subordination. The school had two parties: 



24 GEORGE SAND. 

the sages or good girls, and the diables, their 
opposites. Among the latter Aurore conscien- 
tiously enrolled herself and became a leader in 
their escapades, acquiring the sobriquet of 
" Madcap." These outbreaks led to nothing 
more heinous than playing off tricks on a 
tyrannical mistress, or making raids on the 
forbidden ground of the kitchen garden. But 
the charm that held together the confraternity 
of diables was a grand, long-cherished design, 
to which their best energy and ingenuity were 
devoted — a secret, heroic-sounding enterprise, 
set forth as "the deliverance of the victim." 
A tradition existed among them that a captive 
was kept languishing miserably in some remote 
cell, and they had set themselves the task of 
discovering and liberating this hapless wretch. 
It is needless to say that prisoner and dun- 
geon existed in their girlishly romantic brains 
alone, but easy to see how such a legend might 
possess itself of their imaginations, and to what 
bewitching exploits it might invite firm believers. 
The supervision was not so very strict but that 
a diable of spirit might sometimes play truant 
from the class-room unnoticed. The truants 
would then start on an exciting journey of dis- 
covery through the tortuous passages, exploring 
the darkest recesses of the more deserted por- 
tions of the convent ; now penetrating into the 



EARLY YEARS. 2$ 

vaults, now adventuring on the roofs, regard- 
less of peril to life or limb. This sublimely 
ridiculous undertaking, half-sport, half-earnest, 
so fascinated Aurore as to become the most im- 
portant occupation of her mind ! 

The teaching provided for the young ladies 
appears to have been of the customary superfi- 
cial order — of everything a little ; a little music, 
a little drawing, a little Italian. With English 
she had the opportunity of becoming really con- 
versant, as it was the language commonly 
spoken in the convent, where also she could not 
fail to acquire some insight into the English 
character. This she has treated more fairly 
than England for long was to treat her. Few 
of her gifted literary countrymen have done 
such justice to the sterling good qualities of 
our nation. Evem when, in delineating the 
Briton, she caricatures those peculiarities with 
which he is accredited abroad, her blunders 
seem due to incomplete knowledge rather than 
to any inability to comprehend the spirit of a 
people with whom, indeed, she had many points 
of sympathy. She could penetrate that cold- 
ness and constraint of manner so repelling to 
French natures, and has said of us, with uncon- 
ventional truth, that our character is in reality 
more vehement than theirs ; but with less 
mastery over our emotions themselves, we have 



26 GEORGE SAND. 

more mastery over the expression of our emo- 
tions. Among her chosen school-comrades 
were several English girls, but on leaving the 
convent their paths separated, and in her after 
life she had but rare opportunities for renewing 
these early friendships. 

Some eighteen months had elapsed in this 
fashion when Aurore began to tire of diablerie. 
The victim remained undiscoverable. The 
store of practical jokes was exhausted. Her 
restless spirit, pent up within those convent 
walls, was thirsting for a new experience, — 
something to fill her heart and life. 

It came in the dawn of a religious enthusiasm 
— different from her mystical dream of 
Corambe', which however poetical was out of 
harmony with the spirit and ritual of a Catholic 
convent. But monastic life had its poetical 
aspects also ; and through these it was that its 
significance first successfully appealed to her. 
An evening in the chapel, a Titian picture 
representing Christ on the Mount of Olives, a 
passage chanced upon in the " Lives of the 
Saints," brought impressions that awoke in her 
a new fervor, and inaugurated a period of 
ardent Catholicism. All vagueness was gone 
from her devotional aspirations, which now 
acquired a direct personal import. The change 
brought a revolution in her general behavior. 



EARLY YEARS. 27 

She was understood to have been " converted." 
" Madcap " was now nicknamed " Sainte 
Aurore " by her profane school-fellows, and she 
formed the serious desire and intention of be- 
coming a nun. 

The sisters, a practical-minded community, 
behaved with great good sense and discretion. 
Without distressing the youthful proselyte by 
casting doubts on her " vocation," they re- 
minded her that the consideration was a dis- 
tant one, as for years to come her first duty 
would be to her relatives, who would never 
sanction her present determination. Her con- 
fessor, the Abbe Premord, a Jesuit and man of 
the world, was likewise kindly discouraging ; and 
perceiving that her zeal was leading her to 
morbid self-accusation and asceticism of mood, 
he "shrewdly enjoined upon her as a penance to 
take part in the sports and pastimes with the 
rest as heretofore, much to her dismay. But 
she soon found her liking for these return, and 
with it her health of mind. Unshaken still in 
her private belief that she would take the veil 
in due time, she was content to wait, and in the 
interval to be a useful and agreeable member of 
society. No more insubordination, no more 
mischievous freaks, yet " Sainte Aurore " re- 
mained the life and soul of all recreations 
recognized by authority, which even included 
little theatrical performances now and then. 



28 GEORGE SAND. 

She had become more regular in her studies 
since her mind had taken a serious turn, but her 
heart was less in them than ever. Considering 
this, and the deficiencies in the system -of in- 
struction itself, it is hardly surprising that when, 
in the spring of 1820, her grandmother fearing 
that the monastic idea was taking hold of Auro- 
re in good earnest decided to remove her from 
the Couvent des Anglais es, she knew little more 
than when first she had entered it. 



CHAPTER II. 

GIRLHOOD AND MARRIED LIFE. 

Aurore Dupin was now fifteen, and so far, 
though somewhat peculiarly situated, she and 
her life had presented no very extraordinary 
features, nor promise of the same. Her ener- 
gies had flowed into a variety of channels, and 
manifestly clever and accustomed to take the 
lead though she might be, no one, least of all 
herself, seems to have thought of regarding her 
as a wonder. The Lady Superior of the Con- 
vent des AnglaiseSy who called her "Still 
Waters," had perhaps an inkling of something 
more than met the eye, existent in this pupil. 
But a dozen years were yet to elapse before the 
moment came when she was to start life afresh 
for herself, on a footing of independence and 
literary enterprise, and by her first published 
attempts raise her name at once above the 
names of the mass of her fellow-creatures. 

Old Madame Dupin, warned by failing health 
that her end was not far off, would gladly 
have first assured a husband's protection for her 



30 GEORGE SAND. 

ward, whom she had now succeeded in really 
dissociating from her natural guardian. The 
girl's bringing-up, and an almost complete sep- 
aration for the last five years, had made a gap 
— in habits of mind and feeling — such as could 
hardly be quite bridged over, between her 
mother and herself, But though beginning to 
be sadly aware of this and of the increasing 
violence and asperities of poor Madame Maurice 
Dupin's temper, which made peace under one 
roof with her a matter of difficulty, Aurore 
hung back from the notion of marriage, and 
clearly was much too young to be urged 
into taking so serious a step. So to Nohant 
she returned from the convent in the spring 
of 1820. There she continued to strike 
that judicious compromise between temporal 
and spiritual duties and pleasures enjoined 
on her by her clerical adviser. Still bent on 
choosing a monastic life, when free to choose 
for herself, she was reconciled in the meantime 
to take things as they came, and to make her- 
self happy and add to the happiness of her 
grandmother in the ordinary way. So we find 
her enjoying the visit of one of her school 
friends, getting up little plays to amuse the 
elders, practicing the harp, receiving from her 
brother Hippolyte — now a noisy hussar — 
during his brief visit home, her first initiation 



GIRLHOOD AND MARRIED LIFE. 3 I 

into the arts of riding — for the future her 
favorite exercise — and of pistol - shooting ; 
and last, but not least, beginning to suspect that 
she had learned nothing whatever while at 
school, and setting to work to educate herself, 
as best she could, by miscellaneous reading. 

In the spring of the following year Madame 
Dupin's health and mental faculties utterly 
broke down. But she lived on for another ten 
months. Aurore for the time was placed in a 
most exceptional position for a French girl of 
sixteen. She was thrown absolutely on herself 
and her own resources, uncontrolled and unpro- 
tected, between a helpless, half imbecile invalid, 
and the eccentric, dogmatic pedagogue, Deschar- 
tres. Highly susceptible to influences from with- 
out, her mind, during their sudden and complete 
suspension, seemed as it were invited to dis- 
cover and take its own bent. 

Piqued by the charge of dense ignorance 
flung at her by her ex-tutor, and aware that 
there was truth in it, she would now sit up all 
night reading, finding her appetite for the 
secular knowledge she used to despise grow by 
what it fed upon. The phase of religious ex- 
altation she had recently passed through still 
gave the tone to her mind, and it was with the 
works of famous philosophers, metaphysicians, 
and Christian mystics that she began her 



32 GEORGE SAND. 

studies. Comparing the " Imitation of Christ " 
with Chateaubriand's " Spirit of Christianity," 
and struck here and elsewhere with the wide 
discrepancies and contradictions of opinion 
manifest between great minds ranging them- 
selves under one theological banner, she was 
led on to speculations that alarmed her con- 
science, and she appealed to her spiritual 
director, the Abbe Premord, for advice, fear- 
ing lest her faith might be endangered if 
she read more. He encouraged her to per- 
severe, telling her in no wise to deny herself 
these intellectual enjoyments. But her rigid 
Catholicism was doomed from that hour. Hers 
was that order of mind which can never give 
ostensible adhesion to a creed whilst morally 
unconvinced ; never accept that refuge of the 
weak from the torment of doubt, in abdicating 
the functions of reason and conscience, shifting 
the onus of responsibility on to others, and 
agreeing to believe, as it were, by proxy. She 
had plunged fearlessly and headlong into Aris- 
totle, Bacon, Locke, Condillac, Mably, Leibnitz, 
Bossuet, Pascal, Montaigne, Montesquieu ; be- 
ginning to call many things in question, and, 
through the darkness and confusion into which 
she was sometimes thrown, trying honestly and 
sincerely to feel her way to some more glorious 
faith and light. 



GIRLHOOD AND MARRIED LIFE. 33 

In the convent she had been familiarized 
with Romanism under its most attractive as- 
pects. The moral refinement, the mystery, the 
seclusion, and picturesque beauties of that 
abode had a poetic charm that had carried her 
irresistibly away. But, confronted with the 
system in its practical working, she was stag- 
gered by many of its features. In the country 
churches around her she saw the peasantry en- 
couraged in their grossest superstitions, and the 
ritual, carelessly hurried through, degenerate 
often into mere mockery. The practice of con- 
fession, moreover — her ultimate condemnation 
of which, as an institution whose results for 
good are scanty, its dangers excessive, will be 
endorsed by most persons in this country — and 
the Church's denial of the right of salvation 
to all outside its pale, revolted her ; and she 
caught at the teaching of those who claimed 
liberty of conscience. " Reading Leibnitz," she 
observes, " I became a Protestant without know- 
ing it." That purer and more liberal Chris- 
tianity she dreamed of had, she discovered, been 
the ideal of many great men. The step 
brought her face to face with fresh and grave 
problems of which, she truly observes, the so- 
lutions were beyond her years, and beyond that 
era. There came to her rare moments of ce- 
lestial calm and concord, but she owed them to 



34 GEORGE SAND. 

other and indirect sources of inspiration. The 
study of philosophy, indeed, was not much more 
congenial to her at sixteen than arithmetic had 
been at six. In what merely exercised memory 
and attention she took comparatively but lan- 
guid interest. Instruction, to bring her its full 
profit, must be conveyed through the medium 
of moral emotion, but the mysterious power of 
feeling to stimulate intellect was with her im- 
mense. She turned now to the poets — Shake- 
speare, Byron, Dante, Milton, Virgil, Pope. 
A poet herself, she discovered that these had 
more power than controversialists to strengthen 
her religious convictions, as well as to enlarge 
her mind. Above all, the writings of the poet- 
moralist, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, helped her 
towards resolving the question that occupied 
her, of her true vocation in life, now that her 
determination to take the veil was not a little 
shaken. 

The midnight student was by turns Amazon 
and sick-nurse as well. From the fatigue of 
long watches over her books or by the invalid's 
bedside, she found a better and more invigor- 
ating refreshment than sleep in solitary morn- 
ing rides across country. Her fearlessness on 
horseback was madness in the eyes of the 
neighbors. Riding, then and there, was al- 
most unheard of for ladies, a girl in a riding- 



GIRLHOOD AND MARRIED LIFE. 35 

habit regarded as simply a Cossack in petti- 
coats, and Mademoiselle Dupin's delight in 
horse-exercise sufficed to stamp her as eccentric 
and strong-minded in the opinion of the country 
gentry and the towns-folk of La Chatre. They 
had heard of her studies, too, and disapproved 
of them as unlady-like in character. Philoso- 
phy was bad enough, but anatomy, which she 
had been encouraged to take up by Deschar- 
tres, himself a proficient in medical science, 
was worse — sacrilegious, for a person under- 
stood to be professedly of a devotional turn of 
mind. She went game-shooting with the old 
tutor ; he had a mania for the sport, which she 
humored though she did not share. But when 
quails were the object, she owns to have en- 
joyed her part in the chase, which was to crouch 
in the furrows among the green corn, imitating 
the cry of the birds to entice them within gun- 
shot of the sportsman. Lastly, finding in the 
feminine costume-fashions of that period a dire 
impediment to out-door enterprise of the sort, 
in a region of no roads, or bad roads, of rivers 
perpetually in flood, turning the lanes into 
water-courses for three-fourths of the year, of 
miry fields and marshy heaths, she procured 
for herself a suit of boy's clothes, donning 
blouse and gaiters now and then without com- 
punction for these rough country walks and 
rambles. 



36 GEORGE SAND. 

Here, indeed, was more than enough to raise 
a hue-and-cry at La Chatre, a small provincial 
town, probably neither better nor worse than 
the rest of its class, a class never yet noted for 
charity or liberality of judgment. The strangest 
stories bes^an to be circulated concerning: her, 
stories for the most part so false and absurd as 
to inspire her with a sweeping contempt for 
public opinion. By a very common phenome- 
non, she was to incur throughout her life far 
more censure through freaks, audacious as 
breaches of custom, but intrinsically harmless, 
nor likely to set the fashion to others, than is 
often reserved for errors of a graver nature. 
The conditions of ordinary middle-class society 
are designed, like ready-made clothes, to fit the 
vast majority of human beings, who live under 
them without serious inconvenience. For the 
future George Sand to confine her activities 
within the very narrow restrictions laid down 
by the social code of La Chatre was, it must be 
owned, hardly to be expected. It was perhaps 
premature to throw down the gauntlet at six- 
teen, but her inexperience and isolation were 
complete. The grandmother in her dotage was 
no counsellor at all. Deschartres, an oddity him- 
self, cared for none of these things. Those best 
acquainted with her at La Chatre, families the 
heads of which had known her father well and 



GIRLHOOD AND MARRIED LIFE. 37 

whose younger members had fraternized with 
her from childhood upwards, liked her none the 
less for her unusual proceedings, and defended 
her stoutly against her detractors. 

"You are losing your best friend," said her 
dying grandmother to her when the end came, 
in December, 1821. Aurore was, indeed, placed 
in a difficult and painful situation. She had in- 
herited all the property of the deceased, who, in 
her will, expressed her desire that her own near- 
est relations by her marriage with M. Dupin, a 
family of the name of de Villeneuve, well-off 
and highly connected, should succeed her as 
guardians to her ward. But it was impossible to 
dispute the claims of Madame Maurice Dupin to 
the care of her own daughter if she chose to 
assert them, which she quickly did, bearing off 
the girl with her to Paris — Nohant being left 
under the stewardship of Deschatres — and by 
her unconciliatory behavior further alienating 
the other side of the family from whom Aurore, 
through no fault of her own, was virtually es- 
tranged at the moment when she stood most in 
need of a friend. Twenty years later they came 
forward to claim kinship and friendship again : 
it was then with George Sand, the illustrious 
writer, become one of the immortals. 

Thus her lot was cast for her in her mother's 
home and plebeian circle of acquaintance. So 



38 GEORGE SAND. 

much the worse, it was supposed, for her pros- 
pects, social and matrimonial. This did not dis- 
tress her, but none the less was the time that 
followed an unhappy one. The mother whom 
she had idolized, and of whom she always re- 
mained excessively fond, appears to have been 
something of a termagant in her later years. 
The heavy troubles of her life had aggravated 
one of those irascible and uncontrollable tem- 
pers that can only be soothed by superior vio- 
lence. Aurore, saddened, gentle, and submis- 
sive, only exasperated her. Her fitful affection 
and fitful rages combined to make her daugh- 
ter's life miserable, and to incline the girl un- 
consciously to look over-favorably on any recog- 
nized mode of escape that should present itself. 

A long visit to the country-house of some 
friends near Melun, was hailed as a real relief by 
both. Here there were young people, and 
plenty of cheerful society. Aurore became like 
one of the f amily,» and her mother was per- 
suaded to allow her to prolong her stay indefi- 
nitely. Among the new acquaintance she 
formed whilst on this visit was one that de- 
cided her future. 

M. Casimir Dudevant was a young man on 
terms of intimacy with her hosts, the Duplessis 
family. From the first he was struck by Mile. 
Dupin, who on his further acquaintance was 



GIRLHOOD AND MARRIED LIFE. 39 

not otherwise than pleased with him. The 
sequel, before long, came in an offer of marriage 
on his part, which she accepted with the ap- 
proval of her friends. 

He was seven-and-twenty, had served in the 
army, and studied for the law ; but had expecta- 
tions which promised an independence. His 
father, Colonel Dudevant, a landed proprietor 
in Gascony, whose marriage had proved child- 
less, had acknowledged Casimir, though illegiti- 
mate, and made him his heir. It was reckoned 
not a brilliant parti for the chatelaine of Nohant, 
but a perfectly eligible one. It was not a mar- 
iage de convenance ; the young people had 
chosen freely. Still less was it a love match. 
Romantic sentiment — counted out of place in 
such arrangements by the society they belonged 
to — seems not to have been dreamed of on 
either side. But they had arranged it for them- 
selves, which to Aurore would naturally seem, 
as indeed it was, an improvement on the usual 
mode of procedure, according to which the 
burden of choice would have rested with her 
guardians. It was a mariage de raiso?i founded, 
as she and he believed, on mutual friendliness ; 
in reality on a total and fatal ignorance of each 
other's characters, and probably, on Aurore's 
side, of her own as well. She was only just 
eighteen, and had a wretched home. 



40 GEORGE SAND. 

The match was sanctioned by their parents, 
respectively. In September, 1822, Aurore 
Dupin became Madame Dudevant, and shortly 
afterwards she and her husband established 
themselves at Nohant, there to settle down to 
quiet country life. 

If tranquillity did not bring all the happiness 
that was expected, it was at least unbroken oy 
such positive trials as those to come, and what- 
ever was lacking to Madame Dudevant's felicity 
she forgot for a while in her joy over the birth 
of her son Maurice, in the summer of 1823 — a 
son for whom more than ordinary treasures of 
maternal affection were in store, and who, when 
his childhood was past, was to become and re- 
main until the time of her death a sure consola- 
tion and compensation to her for the troubles of 
her life. 

The first two years after her* marriage were 
spent almost without interruption in the still 
monotony of Nohant. " We live here as quietly 
as possible/' she writes to her mother in June, 
1825, "seeing very few people, and occupying 
ourselves with rural cares." That absolute 
dependence on each other's society that might 
have had its charm for a really well-assorted 
couple was, however, not calculated to prolong 
any illusions that might exist as to the perfect 
harmony of their dispositions. Already in the 



GIRLHOOD AND MARRIED LIFE. 41 

summer of 1824 the Dudevants had sought a 
change from seclusion in a long visit to their 
friends the Duplessis, after which they rented a 
villa in the environs of Paris for a short while. 
The spring found them back at Nohant, and 
the summer of 1825 was marked by a tour to 
the Pyrenees, undertaken in concert with some 
old school-fellows of Aurore's, two sisters, who 
with their father were starting for Cauterets. 
The pleasure of girlish friendships renewed 
gave double charm to the trip, and her delight 
in the mountain scenery knew no bounds. 

" I am in such a state of enthusiasm about the 
Pyrenees," she writes to her mother, "that I 
shall dream and talk of nothing but mountains 
and torrents, caves and precipices, all the rest of 
my life." She joined eagerly in every excursion 
on foot and horseback, but even moderate feats 
of mountaineering, such as are now expected of 
the quietest English lady-tourists by their hus- 
bands and brothers, were then deemed startling- 
ly eccentric, and got her into fresh trouble on 
this head. 

Her letters and the fragments of her journal 
kept during this time, and in which she tried to 
commit to paper her impressions, whilst fresh 
and vivid, of the Pyrenees, show the same pecu- 
liar descriptive power that distinguished her 
novels — that art of seizing grand general effects 



42 GEORGE SAND. 

together with picturesque detail, and depicting 
them in a simple and straightforward manner, in 
which she was an adept. It must be added that 
the diffuseness which characterizes her fiction, 
also pervades her correspondence. Neither can 
be adequately represented by extracts. Her 
composition is like a gossamer web, that must 
be shown in its entirety, as to split it up is to 
destroy it. 

The ensuing winter and spring were passed 
agreeably in visits with her husband to his fam- 
ily at Nerac, Gascony, and to friends in the 
neighborhood. In the summer of 1826 their 
wanderings ended. Once more they settled 
down at Nohant, where Madame Dudevant, ex- 
cept for a few brief absences on visits to friends, 
or to health resorts in the vicinity, remained 
stationary for the next four years, during which 
her after-destiny was unalterably shaping itself. 

It is perfectly idle to speculate on what might 
have happened had her lot in marriage turned 
out a fortunate one, or had she married for love, 
or had the moral character of the partner of her 
life preserved any solid claim on her respect, 
since the contrary was unhappily the case. 
Their situation, no doubt, was anomalous. In 
the young girl of barely eighteen, country-bred 
and intellectually immature, whom M. Dude- 
vant had chosen to marry, who could have dis- 



GIRLHOOD AND MARRIED LIFE. 43 

cerned one of the greatest poetical geniuses 
and most powerful minds of the century ? Some 
commiseration might d priori be felt for the 
petty squire's son who had taken- the hand of 
the pretty country-heiress, promising himself, 
no doubt, a comfortable jog-trot existence in the 
ordinary groove, to discover in after years that 
he was mated with the most remarkable woman 
that had made herself heard of in the literary 
world since Sappho ! But he remained fatally 
blind to the nature of the development that was 
taking place under his eyes, preserving to the 
last the serenest contempt for his wife's intelli- 
gence. Her large mind and enthusiastic tem- 
perament sought in vain for moral sympathy 
from a narrow common spirit, and, in proportion 
as her faculties unfolded, increasing disparity 
between them brought increasing estrangement. 
Such a strong artist-nature may require for its 
expansion an amount of freedom not easily com- 
patible with domestic happiness. But of real 
domestic happiness she never had a fair chance, 
and for a time the will to make the best of her 
lot as it was cast appears not to have been 
wanting. 

The Dudevants, after their return home in 
1826, began to mix more freely in such society 
as La Chatre and the environs afforded, and at 
certain seasons there was no lack of provincial 



44 GEORGE SAND. 

gayeties. Aurore Dudevant all her life long was 
quite indifferent to what she has summarily dis- 
missed as " the silly vanities of finery " — 
" Souffrir pour etre belle " was what from her 
girlhood she declined to do. Regard for the 
brightness of her eyes, her complexion, the 
whiteness of her hands, the shape of her foot, 
never made her sacrifice her midnight study, 
her walks in the sunshine, or her good country 
sabots for the rough lanes of Berry. " To live 
under glass, in order not to get tanned, or chap- 
ped, or faded before the time, is what I have 
always found impossible," she for her part 
has acknowledged. And she cared very moder- 
ately for general society. She writes to her 
mother in spring, 1826 : "It is not the thing of 
all others that reposes, or even that amuses me 
best ; still there are obligations in this life, 
which one must take as they come." She was 
not yet two-and-twenty, and carnival-tide with 
its social " obligations " in the form of balls and 
receptions was not unwelcome. They snatched 
her away from her increasing depression. She 
writes of these diversions to her mother in a 
lively strain, describing how one ball was kept 
up till nine o'clock the next day, how every Sun- 
day morning the cure preaches against dancing, 
but in the evening the dance goes on in de- 
spite of him — how this cross cure is not their 



GIRLHOOD AND MARRIED LIFE. 45 

own parish curt of St. Chartier, — a very old 
friend and a " character " who, when Madame 
Dudevant was five-and-thirty, used to say of her, 
" Aurore is a child I have always been fond of." 
" As for him, if only he were sixty years 
younger," she adds, " I would undertake to 
make him dance himself if I set about it." 
Then follows an amusing sketch of a rustic 
bridal, the double marriage of two members of 
the Nohant establishment : 

The wedding-feast came off in our coach-houses — 
there was dinner in one, dancing in the other. The 
splendor was such as you may imagine ; three tallow 
candle-ends by way of illumination, lots of home-made 
wine for refreshment; the orchestra consisting of a bag- 
pipe and a hurdy-gurdy, the noisiest and, therefore, the 
best appreciated in the country side. We invited some 
friends over from La Chatre, and made fools of ourselves 
in a hundred thousand ways ; as, for instance, dressing 
up as peasants in the evening and disguising ourselves so 
well as not to recognize each other. Madame Duplessis 
was charming in a red petticoat ; Ursule, in a blue blouse 
and a big hat was a most comical fellow ; Casimir, got 
up as a beggar, had some halfpence given him in all good 
faith; Stephane, whom I think you know, as a spruce 
peasant, made believe to have been drinking, stumbled 
against our sous-prefet and accosted him — he is a nice 
fellow, and was just going to depart when all of a sudden 
he recognized us. Well, it was a most farcical evening, 
and would have amused you I will engage. Perhaps 
you, too, would have been tempted to put on the country- 
cap, and I will answer for it that there would not have 
been a pair of black eyes to compete with yours. 



46 GEORGE SAND. 

In other letters .written in a vein of charming 
good humor, her facility and spirit are shown in 
her treatment of trivial incidents, or sketches of 
local characters, as this, for example, of an 
ancient female servant in her employ : 

The strangest old woman in the world — active, indus- 
trious, clean and faithful, but an unimaginable grumbler. 
She grumbles by day, and I think by night, when asleep. 
She grumbles whilst making the butter, she grumbles 
when feeding the poultry, she grumbles even at her meals. 
She grumbles at other people, and when she is alone she 
grumbles at herself. I never meet her without asking her 
how her grumbling is getting on, and she grumbles 
away more than ever. 

And elsewhere she has her fling at the little 
squabbles and absurdities of provincial society, 
the "sets" and petty distinctions, giving a hu- 
morous relation of the collapse of her well- 
meaning efforts, in conjunction with friends at 
the sous-prefecture, to do away with some of 
these caste prejudices, of the horror and indig- 
nation created in the oligarchy of La Chatre by 
the apparition of an inoffensive music-master 
and his wife at the sous-prtfet 's reception, horror 
so great that on the next occasion, the salon of 
the official was unfurnished with guests, except 
for the said music-master and the Dudevants 
themselves. She wrote a poetical skit to com- 
memorate the incident, which created great 
amusement among her friends. 



GIRLHOOD AND MARRIED LIFE. 47 

In the autumn, 1828, her daughter Solange 
was born. The care of her two children, to 
whom she was devoted, occupied her seriously. 
Maurice's education was beginning, a fresh in- 
ducement to her to study that she might be bet- 
ter able to superintend his instruction. His 
least indisposition put her into a fever of anx- 
iety. Her own health during all these years 
had repeatedly given cause for alarm. Symp- 
toms of chest-disease showed themselves, but 
afterwards disappeared, her constitutional vigor 
triumphing in the end over complaints which 
seem to a great extent to have been of a ner- 
vous order. Meantime her domestic horizon 
was becoming overcast at many points. 

Her brother, Hippolyte Chatiron, now mar- 
ried, came with his family to settle in the neigh- 
borhood, and spent some time at Nohant. He 
had fallen into the fatal habit of drinking, in 
which he was joined by M. Dudevant to the 
degradation of his habits and, it would be char- 
itable to suppose, to the confusion of his intel- 
ligence. This grave ill came to make an open 
break in the household calm, hitherto undis- 
turbed on the surface. Low company and its 
brutalizing influences were tending to bring 
about a state of things to which the most pa- 
tient of wives might find it hard to submit. A 
role of complete self-effacement was not one it 



48 GEORGE SAND. 

was in her power long to sustain, and the utter 
moral solitude into which she was thrown con- 
solidated those forces inclining her to the ex- 
treme of self-assertion. For together with 
trials without came the growing sense of supe- 
riority, the ennui and unrest springing from 
mental faculties with insufficient outlet, and 
moreover, denied the very shadow of apprecia- 
tion at home, where she saw the claim to her 
deference and allegiance co-exist with a repu- 
diation she resented of all idea of the recipro- 
city of such engagements. 

She had voluntarily handed over the man- 
agement of her property — the revenue of 
which was hardly proportionate to the neces- 
sary expenses and required careful economy — 
to her husband, an arrangement which left her, 
even for pocket money, dependent on him. 
She now set herself to devise some means of 
adding to her resources by private industry. 
The more ambitious project of securing by her 
own exertions a separate maintenance for her- 
self and her children would at this time have 
seemed chimerical, but it haunted her as a 
dream long before it took definite shape. 

It was not in literature that she first fancied 
she saw her way to earning an independent 
income. She had begun to make amateur 
essays in novel-writing, but was as dissatisfied 



GIRLHOOD AND MARRIED LIFE. 49 

with them as with the compositions of her 
childhood, and with a religious novelette she 
had produced whilst in the convent, and speed- 
ily committed to the flames. Again, alluding 
to her attempts, in 1825, at descriptions of the 
Pyrenees, she says : " I was not capable then of 
satisfying myself by what I wrote, for I finished 
nothing, and did not even acquire a taste for 
writing." 

But she had dabbled in painting, and re- 
mained fond of it. " The finest of the arts," 
she calls it, writing to her mother in 1830, "and 
the most pleasant, as a life-occupation, whether 
taken up for a profession, or for amusement 
merely. If I had real talent, I should consider 
such a lot the finest in the world." But neither 
did the decoration of fans and snuff-boxes nor 
the production of little water-color likenesses 
of her children and friends, beyond which her 
art did not go, promise anything brilliant in the 
way of remuneration. 

In her circle of friends at La Chatre — old 
family friends who had known her all her life 
— were those who had recognized and admired 
her superior ability. Here, too, she met more 
than one young spirit with literary aspirations, 
and one, at least, M. Jules Sandeau, who was 
afterwards to achieve distinguished literary 
success. The desire to go and do likewise 



50 GEORGE SAND. 

came and took hold of her, together with the 
conviction of her capability to make her mark. 
However discontented with her essays in novel- 
writing hitherto, she began to be conscious she 
was on the right track. The Revolution of July, 
1830, had just been successfully accomplished, 
and new hopes and ambitions for the world in 
general, and their own country in particular, 
lent a stimulus to the intellectual activity of 
the youth of France — a movement too strong 
not to make itself felt, even in Berry. 

The state of things at Nohant for the last 
two years had, as we have seen, been tending 
rather to stifle than to keep alive any hesitation 
or compunction Madame Dudevant might have 
felt at breaking openly from her present condi- 
tion. In a letter, dated October, 1830, to her 
son's private tutor, M. Boucoiran, who had then 
been a year under their roof in that capacity, 
she remarks, significantly : 

You often wonder at my mobility of temper, my flex- 
ible character. What would become of me without this 
power of self-distraction ? You know all in my life, and 
you ought to understand that but for that happy turn of 
mind which makes me quickly forget a sorrow, I should 
be disagreeable and perpetually withdrawn into myself, 
useless to others, insensible to their affection. 

The distance between herself and her hus- 
band had, indeed, been widening until now the 



GIRLHOOD AND MARRIED LIFE. 5 I 

sole real link between them was their joint love 
for the children. No pretence of mutual affec- 
tion existed any longer. Madame Dudevant's 
feeling seems to have been of indifference 
merely ; M. Dudevant's of dislike, mingled, 
probably, with a little fear. It appears that he 
committed to paper his sentiments on the sub- 
ject, and that this document, ostensibly in- 
tended by him not to be opened till after his 
death, was found and perused by his wife. It 
was the provocation thus occasioned her, and 
the certainty thus acquired of her husband's 
aversion to her society, that brought matters to 
a climax ; so, at least, she asserted in the heat 
of the moment. But nothing, we imagine, 
could long have deferred her next step, strange 
and venturesome though it was. Violent in 
acting on a determination when taken, after the 
manner, as she observes, of those whose deter- 
minations are slow in forming, she declared her 
intentions to her husband, and obtained his 
consent to her plan. 

According to this singular arrangement she 
was to be permitted to spend every alternate 
three months in Paris, where she proposed to 
try her fortune with her pen. She looked for- 
ward to having her little girl to be there with 
her as soon as she was comfortably settled, sup- 
posing the experiment to succeed. For half 



52 GEORGE SAND. 

the year she would continue to reside, as hith- 
erto, at Nohant, so as not to be long separated 
from her son, who was old enough to miss her, 
and to part from whom, on any terms, cost her 
dear. But he was to be sent to school in two 
years, and for the meantime she had secured for 
him the care and services of M. Boucoiran, 
whom she thoroughly trusted. 

Her husband was to allow her ,£120 a year 
out of her fortune, and on condition that the 
allowance should not be exceeded, he left her 
at liberty to get on as she chose, abstaining 
from further interference. 

It seems obvious that this compromise, whilst 
postponing, could only render more inevitable a 
future separation on less amicable terms, though 
neither appear to have realized it at the time. 
Madame Dudevant can have had no motive to 
blind her in the matter beyond her desire, in 
detaching herself from her present position, not 
to disconnect her life from that of her children. 
The freedom she demanded it was probably too 
late to deny. Those about her, her husband 
and M. Chatiron, who, with his family, was tem- 
porarily domesticated at Nohant, and who so 
far supported her as to offer her the loan of 
rooms held by him in Paris, for the first part of 
her stay, thought her resolution but a caprice. 
And viewed by the light of her subsequent 



GIRLHOOD AND MARRIED LIFE. 53 

success it is hard now to realize the boldness of 
an undertaking whose consequences, had it 
failed, must have been humiliating and dis- 
astrous. She had no practical knowledge of the 
world, had received no artistic training, and 
enjoyed none of the advantages of intellectual 
society. But she had extraordinary courage, 
spirit, and energy, springing no doubt from a 
latent sense of extraordinary powers, almost 
matured, though as yet but half-manifest. So 
much she knew of herself, and states modestly : 
"I had discovered that I could write quickly, 
easily, and for long at a time without fatigue ; 
that my ideas, torpid in my brain, woke up and 
linked themselves together deductively in the 
flow of the pen ; that in my life of seclusion, I 
had observed a good deal, and understood pretty 
well the characters I had chanced to come 
across, and that, consequently, I knew human 
nature well enough to describe it." A most 
moderate estimate, in which, however, she had 
yet to convince people that she was not self- 
deceived. 



CHAPTER III. 

DEBUT IN LITERATURE. 

In the first days of January 1831, the Rubicon 
was passed. The step, though momentous in 
any case to Madame Dudevant, was one whose 
ultimate consequences were by none less antici- 
pated than by herself, when to town she came, 
still undecided whether her future destiny were 
to decorate screens and tea-caddies, or to write 
books, but resolved to give the literary career a 
trial. 

For actual subsistence she had her small fixed 
allowance from home ; for credentials she was 
furnished with an introduction or two to literary 
men from her friends in the country who had 
some appreciation, more or less vague, of her in- 
tellectual powers. Though courageous and de- 
termined, she was far from self-confident ; she 
asked herself if she might not be mistaking a 
mere fancy for a faculty, and her first step was 
to seek the opinion of some experienced au- 
thority as to her talent and chances. 

M. de Keratry, a popular novelist, to whom 



DEBUT IN LITERATURE. 55 

she was recommended, spoke his mind to her 
without restraint. It was to the crushing effect 
that a woman ought not to write at all. Her sex, 
Madame Dudevant was informed, can have no 
proper place in literature whatsoever. M. Dela- 
touche, proprietor of the Figaro, poet and nov- 
elist besides, and cousin of her old and intimate 
friends the Duvernets, of La Chatre, was a 
shade more encouraging, even so far committing 
himself as to own that, if she would not let her- 
self be disgusted by the struggles of a beginner, 
there might be a distant possibility for her of 
making some sixty pounds a year by her pen. 
Such specimens of her fiction as she submitted 
to him he condemned without appeal, but he en- 
couraged her to persevere in trying to improve 
upon them, and advised her well in advising her 
to avoid imitation of any school or master, and 
fearlessly to follow her own bent. 

Meantime he took her on to the staff of his 
• paper, then in its infancy and comparative ob- 
scurity. Journalism however was the depart- 
ment of literature least suited to her capabilities, 
and her fellow-contributors, though so much less 
highly gifted than Madame Dudevant, excelled 
her easily in the manufacture of leaders and 
.paragraphs to order. To produce an article of 
a given length, on a given subject, within a 
given time, was for her the severest of ordeals ; 



56 GEORGE SAND. 

here her exuberant facility itself was against 
her. She would exhaust the space allotted to 
her, and find herself obliged to break off just at 
the point when she felt herself " beginning to 
begin." But she justly valued this apprentice- 
ship as a professional experience, bringing her 
into direct relations with the literary world she 
was entering as a perfect stranger. Once able 
to devote herself entirely to composition and to 
live for her work, she found her calling begin 
to assert itself despotically. In a letter to a 
friend, M. Duteil, at La Chatre, dated about six 
weeks after her arrival in Paris, she writes : — 

If I had forseen half the difficulties that I find, I should 
not have undertaken this enterprise. Well, the more I 
encounter the more I am resolved to proceed. Still, I 
shall soon be returning home again, perhaps without hav- 
ing succeeded in launching my boat, but with hopes of 
doing better another time, and with plans of working 
harder than ever. 

Three weeks later we find her writing to her 
son's tutor, M. Boucoiran, in the same strain : — 

I am more than ever determined to follow the literary 
career. In spite of the disagreeables I often meet with, 
in spite of days of sloth and fatigue that come and 
interrupt my work, in spite of the more than humble life 
I lead here, I feel that henceforth my existence is filled. 
I have an object, a task, better say it at once, a passion. 
The profession " of a writer is a violent one, and so to 



DEBUT IN LITERATURE. S7 

speak, indestructible. Once let it take possession of 
your wretched head, you cannot stop. I have not been 
successful; my work was thought too unreal by those 
whom I asked for advice. 

But still she persisted, providing, as best she 
could, "copy " for the Figaro, at seven francs a 
column, and trying the experiment of literary 
collaboration, working at fictions and magazine 
articles, the joint productions of herself and 
her friend and fellow-student, Jules Sandeau, 
who wr^ote for the Revue de Paris. It was 
under his name that these compositions ap- 
peared, Madam Dudevant, in these first trial- 
attempts, being undesirous to bring hers before 
the public. 

" I have no time to write home," she pleads, 
petitioning M. Boucoiran for news from the 
country, " but I like getting letters from No- 
hant, it rests my heart and my head." 

And alluding to her approaching temporary 
return thither, in accordance with the terms of 
her agreement with M. Dudevant, she writes to 
M. Charles "Duvernet : — 

I long to get back to Berry, for I love my children 
more than all besides, and, but for the- hopes of becoming 
one day more useful to them with the scribe's pen than 
with the housekeeper's needle, I should not leave them 
for so long. But in spite of innumerable obstacles I 
mean to take the first steps in this thorny career. 



58' GEORGE SAND. 

In her case it was really the first step only 
that cost dear ; whilst against the annoyances 
with which, as a new comer, she had to con- 
tend, there was ample compensation to set in 
the novel interests of the intellectual, political, 
and artistic world stirring around her. Coun- 
try life and peasant life she had had the oppor- 
tunity of studying from her youth up ; of 
middle-class society she had sufficient experi- 
ence ; she counted relatives and friends among 
the noblesse, and had moved in those charmed 
circles ; but the republic of art and letters, to 
which by nature and inclination she emphati- 
cally belonged, was a land of promise first 
opened up to her now. She was eager and 
impatient to deprovincialize herself. 

In the art galleries of the Louvre, at the 
theatre and the opera, in the daily interchange 
of ideas on all kinds of topics with her little 
circle of intelligent acquaintance, her mind 
grew richer by a thousand new impressions and 
enjoyments, and rapidly took fresh strength 
together with fresh knowledge. The heavy 
practical obstacles that interfere with such self- 
education on the part of one of her sex were 
seriously aggravated in her case by her narrow 
income. How she surmounted them is well 
known ; assuming on occasion a disguise which, 
imposing on all but the initiated, enabled her 



DEBUT IN LITERATURE. 59 

everywhere to pass for a collegian of sixteen, 
and thus to go out on foot in all weathers, at all 
hours, alone if necessary, unmolested and un- 
observed, in theatre or restaurant, boulevard or 
reading-room. In defense of her adoption of 
this strange measure, she pleads energetically 
the perishable nature of feminine attire in her 
day, — a day before double-soles or ulsters 
formed part of a lady's wardrobe, — its incompati- 
bility with the incessant going to and fro which 
her busy life required, the exclusion of her sex 
from the best part of a Paris theatre, and so 
forth ; the ineffable superiority of a costume 
which, economy and comfort apart, secured her 
equal independence with her men competitors 
in the race, and identical advantages as to the 
rapid extension of her field of observation. 
The practice, though never carried on by her to 
such an extent as very commonly asserted, was 
one to which she did not hesitate to resort now 
and then in later years, as a mere measure of 
convenience — a measure the world will only 
tolerate in the Rosalinds and Violas of the 
stage. The career of George Sand was, like 
her nature, entirely exceptional, and any attempt 
to judge it in any other light lands us in hope- 
less moral contradictions. She had extraordi- 
nary incentives to prompt her to extraordinary 
actions, which may be condemned or excused, 



6o GEORGE SAND. 

but which there could be no greater mistake 
than to impute to ordinary vulgar motives. It 
must also be remembered that fifty years ago, 
the female art student had no recognized ex- 
istence. She was shut out from that modicum 
of freedom and of practical advantages it were 
arbitrary to deny, and which may now be en- 
joyed by any earnest art aspirant in almost any 
great city. However unjustifiable the proceed- 
ing resorted to for a time by George Sand and 
Rosa Bonheur may be held to be, it cannot pos- 
sibly be said they had no motive for it but a 
fantastic one. 

Writing to her mother from Nohant, whither 
she had returned in April for a length of time 
as agreed, Madam Dudevant speaks out char- 
acteristically in defence of her love of indepen- 
dence : — 

I am far from having that love of pleasure, that need 
of amusement with which you credit me. Society, sights, 
finery, are not what I want, — you only are under this 
mistake about me, — it is liberty. To be all alone in the 
street and able to say to myself, I shall dine at four or at 
seven, according to my good pleasure ; I shall go to the 
Tuileries by way of the Luxembourg instead of going by 
the Champs Elysees ; this is what amuses me far more 
than silly compliments and stiff drawing-room assemblies. 

Such audacious self-emancipation, she was 
well aware, must estrange her from her friends 



DEBUT IN LITERATURE 6 1 

of her own sex in the upper circles of Parisian 
society, and she anticipated this by making no 
attempt to renew such connections. For the 
moment she thought only of taking the shortest, 
and, as she judged, the only way for a " torpid 
country wife," like herself, to acquire the free- 
dom of action and the enlightenment she 
needed. Those most nearly related to her 
offered no opposition. It was otherwise with 
her mother-in-law, the baronne Dudevant, with 
whom she had a passage-of-arms at the outset 
on the subject of her literary campaign, here 
disapproved in toto. 

"Is it true," enquired this lady, "that it is 
your intention to print books ?" 

"Yes, madame." 

"Well, I call that an odd notion ! " 

"Yes, madame." 

" That is all very good and very fine, but I 
hope you are not going to put the name that I 
bear on the covers of printed books f" 

"Oh, certaintly not, madame, there is no 
danger." 

The liberty to which other considerations 
were required to give way was certainly com- 
plete enough. The beginning of July found 
her back at work in the capital. On the Quai 
St. Michel — a portion of the Seine embank- 
ment facing the towers of Notre Dame, the 



62 GEORGE SAND. 

Sainte Chapelle, and other picturesque monu- 
ments of ancient Paris — she had now definitely- 
installed herself in modest lodgings' on the fifth 
story. Accepted and treated as a comrade by a 
little knot of fellow literati and colleagues on 
the Figaro, two of whom — Jules Sandeau and 
Felix Pyat — were from Berry, like herself; and 
with Delatouche, also a Berrichon, for their 
head-master, she served thus singularly her 
brief apprenticeship to literature and experi- 
ence ; — sharing with the rest both their studies 
and their relaxations, dining with then at cheap 
restaurants, frequenting clubs, studios, and 
theatres of every degree; the youthful effer- 
vescence of her student-friends venting itself in 
such collegians' pranks as parading deserted 
quarters of the town by moonlight, in the small 
hours, chanting lugubrious strains to astonish 
the shopkeepers. The only great celebrity 
whose acquaintance she had made was Balzac, 
himself the prince of eccentrics. Although he 
did not encourage Madame Dudevant's literary 
ambition, he showed himself kindly disposed 
towards her and her young friends, and she 
gives some amusing instances that came under 
her notice of his oddities. Thus, once after a 
little Bohemian dinner at his lodgings in the 
Rue Cassini, he insisted on putting on a new 
and magnificent dressing-gown, of which he 



DEBUT IN LITERATURE. 63 

was exceedingly vain, to display to his guests, 
of whom Madame Dudevant was one ; and not 
satisfied therewith, must needs go forth, thus 
accoutred, to light them on their walk home. 
All the way he continued to hold forth to them 
about four Arab horses, which he had not got 
yet, but meant to get soon, and of which, 
though he never got them at all, he firmly be- 
lieved himself to have been possessed for some 
time. "He would have escorted us thus," 
says Madame Dudevant, "from one extremity 
of Paris to another, if we had let him." 

Twice again before the end of the year, faith- 
ful to her original intentions, we find her return- 
ing to her place as mistress of the house at No- 
hant, occupying herself with her children, and 
working at the novel Indiana, which was to 
create her reputation the following year. 

Meanwhile, a novelette, La Prima Donna, 
the outcome of the literary collaboration with 
Jules Sandeau, had found its way into a maga- 
zine, the Revue de Paris ; and was followed by 
a longer work of fiction, of the same double 
authorship, entitled Rose et Blanche, published 
under Sandeau's nom de plume of Jules Sand. 

This literary partnership was not to last long, 
and to-day the novel will be found omitted in 
the list of the respective works of its authors. 
Its perusal will hardly repay the curious. The 



64 GEORGE SAND. 

powerful genius of Madame Dudevant, the ele- 
gant talent of the author of Mile, de la Seig- 
liere, are mostly conspicuous by their absence in 
Rose et Blanche, or La Comedienne et la Relig- 
ieuse, an imitative attempt, and not a happy one, 
in the style of fiction then in vogue. 

Madame Dudevant had stepped into the liter- 
ary world at the moment of the most ardent 
activity of the Romantic movement. The new 
school was on the point of achieving its earliest 
signal triumphs. Victor Hugo's first poems had 
just been followed by the dramas Hernani and 
Marion Delorme. Dumas' Antony was drawing 
crowded and enthusiastic houses. A few 
months before the publication of Rose et Blanche 
appeared Notre Dame de Paris. The passion 
for innovation which had seized on all the 
younger school of writers was leading many 
astray. The strange freaks of Hugo's genius 
had, to quote Madame Dudevant' s own expres- 
sion, excited a " ferocious appetite" for what- 
ever was most outrageous, and set taste, prece- 
dent, and probability most flatly at defiance. 
From those aberrations into which the great 
master's imitators had been betrayed Madame 
Dudevant's fine art-instincts were calculated to 
preserve her ; but she had not yet learned to 
trust to them implicitly. 

Rose et Blanche, though containing many 



DEBUT IN LITERATURE. 65 

clever passages — waifs and strays of shrewd 
observation, description and character analysis, 
— is in the main ill-conceived, ill-constructed, 
and unreal. The two authors have sacrificed 
their individualities in a mistaken effort to fol- 
low the fashion's lead, resulting in a most inef- 
fective compound of tameness and sensation- 
alism. Amazing adventures are undergone by 
each heroine before she is one -and -twenty. 
Angels of innocence, they are doomed to have 
their existences crushed out by the heartless 
conduct of man, Blanche expiring of dismay 
almost as soon as she is led from the altar, Rose 
burying herself and her despair in a convent. 
The then favorite heroes of romance were of 
the French Byronic type — young men of for- 
tune who have exhausted life before they are 
flve-and-twenty, whose minds are darkened by 
haunting memories of some terrific crime, but 
who are none the* less capable of all the virtues 
and great elevation of sentiment on occasion. 
None of these requisitions are left unfulfilled 
by the unamiable hero of Rose et Blanche, a 
work which did little to advance the fortunes of 
its authors, and whose intrinsic merits offer lit- 
tle warrant for dragging it out of the oblivion 
into which it has been suffered to drop. 

To escape the influences of the literary revo- 
lution everywhere then triumphant was of 
3 



66 GEORGE SAND. 

course impossible. To make them serve her 
individual genius instead of enslaving her in- 
dividuality was all Madame Dudevant needed to 
learn. Her friend Balzac had done this for 
himself, suiting his genius to the period without 
any sacrifice of originality. Although not yet 
at the height of his fame he had produced many 
most successful works, and Madame Dudevant, 
according to her own account, derived great 
profit from the study of his method, although 
with no inclination to follow in his direction. 
Yet he afterwards observed to her, " Our two 
roads lead to the same goal." 

Rose et Blanche, though little noticed by the 
public, brought a publisher to the door, one Er- 
nest Dupuy, with an order for another novel by 
the same authors. Indiana was ready-written, 
and came in response to the demand. But as 
Sandeau had had no hand whatever in this com- 
position, the signature had of course to be 
varied. The publisher wishing to connect the 
new novel with its predecessor it was decided 
to alter the prefix only. She fixed on George, 
as representative of Berry, the land of husband- 
men ; and George Sand thus became pseudonym 
of the author of Indiana, a pseudonym whose 
origin imaginative critics have sought far afield 
and some have discovered in her alleged sympa- 
thy with Kotzebue's murderer, Karl Sand, and 



d£but in literature, 67 

political assassination in general ! Its assump- 
tion was to inaugurate a new era in her life. 

In the last days of April, 1832, appeared In- 
diana, by George Sand. " I took," says Madame 
Dudevant, in her account of the transaction, 
"the 1,200 francs paid me by the publisher, 
which to me were a little fortune, hoping he 
would see his money back again." She had re- 
cently returned from one of her periodical visits 
to Nohant, accompanied this time by her little 
girl, whom the progress already achieved en- 
abled her now to take into her charge, and was 
living very quietly and studiously in her humble 
establishment on the Quai St. Michel, when 
she awoke to find herself famous. 

Her success, for which indeed there had been 
nothing to prepare her — neither flattery of 
friends, nor vain-glorious ambition within her- 
self — was immediate and conclusive. What- 
ever differences of opinion might exist about the 
book, critics agreed in recognizing there the 
revelation of a new writer of extraordinary 
power. " One of those masters who have been 
gifted with the enchanter's wand and mirror," 
wrote Sainte-Beuve, a few months later, when 
he did not hesitate to compare the young author 
to Madame de Stael. The novel of sentimental 
analysis, a style in which George Sand is unsur- 
passed, was then a fresh and promising field. 



68 GEORGE SAND. 

Indiana, without the aid of marvellous incidents, 
startling crimes, or iniquitous mysteries, riveted 
the attention of its readers as firmly as the 
most thrilling tales of adventure and horror. 
It is a "soul's tragedy," and that is all — the 
love-tragedy vulgarized since by repeated treat- 
ment by inferior novelists, of a romantic, sensi- 
tive, passionate, high-natured girl, hopelessly 
ill-mated with a somewhat tyrannical and stupid, 
yet not entirely ill-disposed old colonel, and ex- 
posed to the seductions of a Lovelace — the 
truth about whose unloveable character, in its 
profound and heartless egoism, first bursts 
upon her at the moment when, maddened by 
brutal insult, she is driven to claim the gener- 
ous devotion he has proffered a thousand times. 
Side by side with the ideal of selfishness, Ray- 
mon stands in contrast with the ideally chival- 
rous Ralph, Indiana's despised cousin, who, 
loving her disinterestedly and in silence, has 
watched over her as a guardian-friend to the 
last, and does save her ultimately. The florid 
descriptions, the high-flown strains of emotion, 
which now strike as blemishes in the book, were 
counted beauties fifty years since ; and even 
to-day, when reaction has brought about an 
extreme distaste for emotional writing, they can- 
not conceal the superior ability of the novelist. 
The sentiment, however extravagantly worded, 



' DEBUT IN LITERATURE. 69 

is genuine and spontaneous, and has the true 
ring of passionate conviction. The characters 
are vividly, if somewhat closely drawn and con- 
trasted, the scenes graphic ; every page is col- 
ored by fervid imagination, and despite some 
violations of probability in the latter portion, out 
of keeping artistically with the natural character 
of the rest of the book, the whole has the 
strength of that unity and completeness of con- 
ception which is the distinguishing stamp of a 
genius of the first order. The entrain of the 
style is irresistible. It was written, she tells 
us, tout (Tim jet, under the force of a stimulus 
from within. Ceasing to counterfeit the man- 
ner of anyone, or to consult the exigencies of 
the book-market, she for the first time ventures 
to be herself responsible for the inspiration and 
the mode of expression adopted. 

The papers spoke of the new novel in high 
tones of praise, the public read it with avidity. 
The authorship, for a time, continued to perplex 
people. In spite of the masculine pseudonym, 
certain feminine qualities, niceties of perception 
and tenderness, were plainly recognized in the 
work, but the possibility that so vigorous and 
well-executed a composition could come from a 
feminine hand was one then reckoned scarcely 
admissible. Even among those already in the ■ 
secret were sceptics who questioned the author's 



70 GEORGE SAND. 

power to sustain her success, since nearly every- 
body, it is said, can produce one good novel. 

" The success of Indiana has thrown me into 
dismay," writes Madame Dudevant, in July, 1832, 
to M. Charles Duvernet, at La Chatre. "Till 
now, I thought my writing was without con- 
sequence, and would not merit the slightest 
attention. Fate has decreed otherwise. The 
unmerited admiration of which I have become 
the object must be justified." And Valentine 
was already in progress ; and its publication, 
not many months after Indiana, to be a conclu- 
sive answer to the challenge. 

The season of 1832, in which George Sand 
made her debut in literature, was marked, in 
Paris, by public events of the most tragic char- 
acter. In the spring, the cholera made its ap- 
pearance, and struck panic into the city. Six 
people died in the house where Madame Dude- 
vant resided, but neither she nor any of her 
friends were attacked. She was next to be a 
witness of political disturbances equally terrible. 
The. disappointment felt by the Liberals at the 
results of the Revolution of 1830, and of the 
establishment of Louis Philippe's Government, 
upon which such high hopes had been founded, 
was already beginning to assert itself in secret 
agitation, and in the sanguinary street insurrec- 
tions, such as that of June, 1832, sanguinarily 



DEBUT IN LITERATURE. 7 1 

repressed. Madame Dudevant at this time had 
no formulated political creed, and political sub- 
jects were those least attractive to her. But 
though born in the opposite camp she felt all 
her natural sympathies incline to the Republi- 
can side. They were further intensified by 
the scenes of which she was an eye-witness, 
cjid which roused a similar feeling even among 
r.nti-revolutionists. Thus Heine, in giving an 
; ccount of the struggle mentioned above, and 
speaking of the' enthusiasts who sacrificed their 
lives in this desperate demonstration, exclaims : 
"I am, by God! no Republican. I know that if 
the Republicans conquer they will cut my 
throat, and all because* I don't admire all they 
admire ; but yet the tears came into my eyes as 
I trod those places still stained with their blood. 
I had rather I, and all my fellow-moderates, had 
died than those Republicans." 

Amid such disturbing influences it is not sur- 
prising that we find her complaining in the let- 
ter last quoted that her work makes no progress ; 
but the lost time was made up for by redoubled 
industry during her summer visit to Nohant. 

In the autumn appeared Valentine. This 
second novel not only confirmed the triumph 
won by the first, but was a surer proof of the 
writer's calibre, as showing what she could do 
with simpler materials. Here, encouraged by 



J2 GEORGE SAND. 

success, she had ventured to take her stand 
entirely on her own ground — dispensing even 
with an incidental trip to the tropics, which, in 
Indiana, strikes as a misplaced concession to 
the prevalent craze for Oriental coloring — and 
to lay the scene in her own obscure province of 
Berry, her first descriptions of which show her 
rare comprehension of the poetry of landscape. 
Like Indiana, Valentine is a story of the affec- 
tions ; like Indiana, it is a domestic tragedy, of 
which the girl-heroine is the victim of a perni- 
cious system that makes of marriage, in the first 
instance, a mere commercial speculation. In- 
deed, the extreme painfulness of the story 
would render the whole too repulsive but for 
the charm of the setting, which relieves it not 
a little, and a good deal of humor in the treat- 
ment of the minor characters, notably the 
eighteenth century marquise, and the Lhery 
family of \><Z2J$>2j\X.-parvenus. The personages 
are drawn with more finish than those in In- 
diana ; the tone is more natural in its pitch. 
It is the work of one who finds in every-day 
observation, as well as in such personal emo- 
tions as come but once in a life-time, the in- 
spiration that smaller talents can derive from 
the latter alone. 

In both her consummate art, or rather natural 
gift of the art of narrative, is the mainstay of 



DEBUT IN LITERATURE. 7$ 

the fabric her imagination has reared. That 
incomparable style of hers is like some magic 
fairy-ring, that bears the wearer, safe and vic- 
torious, through manifold perils — perils these 
of prolixity, exaggeration, and disdain of care- 
ful construction. Both Indiana and Valentine, 
moreover, contain scenes and passages offensive 
to English taste, but it is impossible fairly to 
criticise the fiction of a land where freer ex- 
pression in speech and in print than with us is 
habitually recognized and practiced, from our 
own standpoint of literary decorum. It was 
not for this feature that French criticism had 
already begun to charge her books with danger- 
ous tendencies (thus contributing largely to 
noise her fame abroad), as breathing rebellion 
against the laws of present society ; charges 
which, so far as Indiana and Valentine are con- 
cerned, had, as is now generally admitted, but 
little foundation. Each is the story of an un- 
happy marriage, but there is no attempt what- 
ever to throw contempt on existing institutions, 
or to propound any theory, unless it be the 
idea — no heresy or novelty in England at 
least — that marriage, concluded without love 
on either side, is fraught with special dangers 
to the wife, whose happiness is bound up with 
her affections. It was the bold and uncom- 
promising manner in which this plain fact was 



74 GEORGE SAND. 

brought forward, the energy of the protest 
against a real social abuse, which moved some 
critics to sound a war-cry for which, as yet, no 
just warrant had been given. 

Besides these two novels, containing full 
proof of her genius, if not of its highest em- 
ployment, there appeared, late in 1832, that 
remarkable novelette, La Marquise, revealing 
fresh qualities of subtle penetration and clear 
analysis. The flexibility of her imagination, the 
variety in her modes of its application, form an 
essential characteristic of her work. Not by 
any single novel, nor, indeed by half-a-dozen 
taken at random, can she be adequately repre- 
sented. 

When in the winter of 1832 Madame Sand 
returned with her little girl to Paris after spend- 
ing the autumn, as usual, at Nohant, it was to 
rather more comfortable quarters, on the Quai 
Malplaquet. The rapid sale of her books was 
placing her in comparatively easy circumstances, 
and giving fresh spur to her activity. But her 
situation was transforming itself fast ; the 
freedom of obscurity was lost to her for ever 
from the day when the unknown personage, 
George Sand, became the object of general 
curiosity — of curiosity redoubled in Paris by 
the rumors current there of her exceptional 
position, eccentric habits, and interesting per- 
sonality. 



d£but in literature. 75 

The celebrated portrait of her by Eugene Dela- 
croix was painted in the year 1833. It is a 
three-quarter view, and represents her wearing 
her quasi masculine redingote, with broad revers 
and loosely knotted silk neck-tie. Of some- 
what later date is a highly interesting drawing 
by Calamatta, well-known by engravings ; but 
of George Sand in her first youth no likeness un- 
fortunately has been left to the world. She has 
been most diversely described by her different 
contemporaries. But that at this time she pos- 
sessed real beauty is perfectly evident ; for all 
that she denies it herself, and that, unlike most 
women, and nearly all French women, she 
scorned to enhance it by an elaborated toilette. 
Heine, though he never professed himself one 
of her personal adorers, compares the beauty of 
her head to that of the Venus of Milo, saying, 
" It bears the stamp of ideality, and recalls the 
noblest remaining examples of Greek art." 
Her figure was somewhat too short, but her 
hands and feet were very small and beautifully 
shaped. His acquaintance with her dates from 
the early years of her literary triumphs, and his 
description is in harmony with Calamatta's 
presentation. She had dark curling hair, a 
beauty in itself, falling in profusion to her 
shoulders, well-formed features, pale olive- 
tinted complexion, the countenance expressive, 



y6 GEORGE SAND. 

the eyes dark and very fine, not sparkling, but 
mild and full of feeling. The face reminds us 
of the character of " Still Waters," attributed to 
the Aurore Dupin of fifteen by the Lady Su- 
perior of the English convent. Her voice was 
soft and muffled, and the simplicity of her man- 
ner has been remarked on by those who sought 
her acquaintance, as a particular charm. Yet, 
like all reserved natures, she often failed to 
attract strangers at a first meeting. In general 
conversation she disappointed people, by not 
shining. Men and women, immeasurably her 
inferiors, surpassed her in ready wit and bril- 
liant repartee. Her taciturnity in society has 
been somewhat ungenerously laid to a parti 
pris. She was one, it is said, who took all and 
gave nothing. That she was intentionally chary 
of her passing thoughts and impressions to 
those around her, is, however, sufficiently dis- 
proved by her letters. Here she shows herself 
lavish of her mind to her correspondents. Con- 
versation and composition necessitate a very 
different brain action, and her marvellous 
facility in writing seems really to have been 
accompanied with no corresponding readiness 
of speech and reply. Probably it was only, as 
she herself states, when she had a pen in her 
hand that her lethargic ideas would arise and 
flow in order as they should. And the need of 






DEBUT IN LITERATURE. 77 

self-expression felt by all those who have not 
the gift of communicating themselves fully and 
easily in speech or manner, a strong need in 
her case, from her having so much to express, 
was the spur that drove her to seek and find 
the mode of so doing in art. 

Her silence in company certainly did not de- 
tract from her fascination upon a closer ac- 
quaintance. Of those who fell under the spell, 
the more fortunate came at once to terms of 
friendship with her, which remained undis- 
turbed through life. Thus, of one among this 
numerous brotherhood, Francois Rollinat, with 
whom she would congratulate herself on having 
realized the perfection of such an alliance of 
minds, she could write when recording their 
friendship, then already a quarter of a century 
old, that it was still young as compared with 
some that she counted, and that dated from her 
childhood. 

Others fell in love with her, and found her 
unresponsive. With some of these, jealousies 
and misunderstandings arose, and led to es- 
trangements, for the most part but temporary. 
Yet the winner of her heart was scarcely to be 
envied. She was apt — she has herself thus 
expressed it — to see people through a prism of 
enthusiasm, and afterwards to recover her 
lucidity of judgment. Great, no doubt, was 



78 GEOXGE SAND. 

her power of self -illusion ; it betrayed her into 
errors that have been unsparingly judged. 
For her power of calm and complete disillusion 
she was perhaps unique among women, and it 
is no wonder if mankind have found it hard to 
forgive. 



CHAPTER IV. 

LELIA. ITALIAN JOURNEY. 

It was less than two years since she had come 
up to the capital, to seek her fortunes there in 
literature. Aurore Dudevant, hereafter to be 
spoken of as George Sand (for she made her 
adopted name more her own than that she had 
borne hitherto, and became George Sand for her 
private friends as well as for the public,) found 
herself raised to eminence among the eminent, 
And it was at an exceptionally brilliant epoch 
in French imaginative literature that the dis- 
tinction had been won. Such a burst of talent 
as that which signalized the opening years of 
Louis Philippe's reign is unexampled in French 
literary history. With Hugo, Dumas, De 
Musset, Balzac, not to mention lesser stars, the 
author of Indiana and Valentine, although a 
woman, was acknowledged as worthy to rank. 
The artist in her, a disturbing element in her 
inner life which had driven her out of the 
spiritual bondage and destitution of a petty pro- 
vincial environment to secure for herself free- 



80 GEORGE SAND. 

dom and expansion, had justified the audacity 
of the move by a triumphant artistic success. 
From this time onward her artistic faculty dom- 
inated her life, often, probably, unknown to her- 
self an invincible force of instinct she obeyed, 
whilst assigning, in all good faith, other motives 
for her course of action, and for real or appar- 
ent inconsequences, that have been constantly 
misrepresented and misunderstood. 

So sudden and abrupt a change would have 
turned all heads but the strongest. Publishers 
competed with one another to secure her next 
work. Buloz, proprietor of the Revue des Deux 
Mondes y engaged her to write regularly for his 
periodical, to which, for the next ten years, 
she never ceased to be a regular and extensive 
contributor. Although the scale of remunera- 
tion was not then very high she was clearly se- 
cure, so long as she allowed nothing to interfere 
with her literary work, of earning a sufficient 
income for her own needs. She had learnt the 
importance of pecuniary independence, and 
never pretended to despise the reward of her 
industry. To luxury she was indifferent, but the 
necessity of strict economy was a burden she 
was impatient of ; she liked to have plenty to 
give away, and was always excessively liberal to 
the poor. Her little dwelling on the Quai 
Malplaquet was no longer the hermitage of an 



L&LIA — IT A LI AN JO URNE Y. 8 1 

anonymous writer of no account. The great in 
art and letters, leading critics, such as Sainte- 
Beuve and Gustave Planche, came eager to seek 
her acquaintance, and delighting to honor the 
obscure student of a year ago. 

Writing to M. Boucoiran after her return to 
Paris in December, 1832, she describes her 
altered position : — 

All daylong I am beset with visitors, who are not all 
entertaining. It is a calamity of my profession, which I 
am partly obliged to bear. But in the evening I shut 
myself up with my pens and ink, Solange, my piano, and 
a fire. With all these I pass some right pleasant hours. 
No noise but the sounds of a harp, coming I know not 
whence, and of the playing of a fountain under my win- 
dow. This is highly poetical — pray don't make game 
of me ! 

There was another side to her success. Fame 
brought trials and annoyances that fell with 
double severity on her as a woman. Her door 
was besieged by a troop of professional beggars, 
impostors, impertinent idlers, and inquisitive 
newsmongers. Jealousy and ill-will, inevitably 
attendant on sudden good fortune such as hers, 
busied themselves with direct calumny and in- 
sidious misrepresentation. No statement so 
unfounded, so wildly improbable about her, but 
it obtained circulation and credit. Till the end 
of her life she remained the centre of a cloud of 



82 GEORGE SAND. 

myths, many, to the present day, accepted as 
gospel. People insisted on identifying her with 
the heroines of her novels. Incidents, personal 
descriptions, nay, whole letters extracted from 
these novels will be found literally transcribed 
into alleged biographies of herself and her 
friends, as her own statement of matters of fact. 
Now, though the spirit of her life is strongly 
and faithfully represented by her fiction taken 
as a whole, those who would read in any special 
novel the literal record of any of the special 
events of her existence cannot be too much on 
their guard. Whatever the material under treat- 
ment, George Sand must retouch, embellish, 
transform, artist-fashion, as her genius shall dic- 
tate, till often little resemblance is left between 
the original and the production it has done no 
more than suggest. Romance and reality are 
so fused together in these apparent outpourings 
of spirit that her nearest friends were at a loss 
how to separate them. As an actress into 
many a favorite part, so could she throw herself 
into her favorite characters ; but seldom if ever 
will much warrant be found in actual fact for 
identifying these creations with their creatress. 
How, indeed, could so many-sided a nature as 
hers be truly represented in a single novel? 
Her rare physical and mental energies enabled 
her to combine a life of masculine intellectual 



L£LIA — ITALIAN JOURNE V. 83 

activity with the more highly emotional life of 
a woman, and with vigilance in her maternal 
cares. Maurice was placed in the spring of 1833 
at the College Henri IV., at Paris ; thus she 
had now both son and daughter near her, and 
watched indefatigably over them, their childish 
illnesses and childish amusements, their moral 
and intellectual training absorbing a large share 
of her time and attention. Heine, a friendly 
visitor at her house, says : — 

I have often been present for hours whilst she gave 
her children a lesson in French, and it is a pity that the 
whole of the French Academy could not have been pres- 
ent too, as it is quite certain that they might have de- 
rived great profit from it. 

Not all the distractions of fame and work, of 
passionate pleasure or passionate sorrow, ever 
relaxed her active solicitude for the present 
and future welfare of her two young children. 
"They give me the only real joys of my life," 
she repeats again and again. 

Le'lia, begun immediately after Valentine was 
published in the spring of 1833, and created an 
immense sensation. Hailed by her admirers as 
a sign of an accession of power, of power ex- 
erted in quite a new direction, it brought down 
on the writer's head a storm of hostile criti- 
cism, as a declared enemy of religion and 



84 . GEORGE SAND. 

domestic morality — enhancing her celebrity 
not a little. 

L<?lia, a lyrical novel — an outburst of poeti- 
cal philosophy in prose, stands alone among the 
numerous productions of George Sand. Here 
she takes every sort of poetical license, in a 
work without the restrictions of poetic form 
which are the true conditions of so much lati- 
tude. " Manfred " and " Alastor " are fables 
not further removed from real life than is Lelia. 
The personages are like allegorical figures, 
emblematic of spiritual qualities on a grand 
scale, the scenes like the paradisiacal gardens 
that visited the fancy of Aurore Dupin when a 
child. There is no action. The interest is not 
in the characters and what they do, but in what 
they say. The declamatory style, then so 
popular, is one the taste for which has so com- 
pletely waned that Lelia will find comparatively 
few readers in the present day, fewer who will 
not find its perusal wearisome, none perhaps 
whose morality, however weak, will be seriously 
shaken by utterances ever and anon hovering 
on the perilous confines of the sublime and the 
ludicrous. 

Leila, a female Faust or Manfred, a myste- 
rious muse-like heroine, who one night sleeps 
on the heathery mountain-side, the next displays 
the splendor of a queen in palaces and fairy- 



LELIA — ITALIAN JO URNE V. 8$ 

like villas ; her sorely tried and hapless lover, 
Stenio, the poet, who pours forth odes to his 
own accompaniment on the harp, and lingers 
the night long among Alpine precipices brood- 
ing over the abyss ; Trenmor, the returned 
gentleman convict and Apostle of the Carbon- 
ari, whose soul has been refreshed, made young 
and regenerated at the galleys ; and the mad 
Irish priest, Magnus, are impossible personages, 
inviting to easy ridicule, and neither wisdom 
nor folly from their lips is likely to beguile the 
ears of the present generation. 

It is no novel, but a poetical essay, fantasti- 
cally conceived and executed with the sans gene 
of an improvisatore. For those who admire the 
genius of George Sand its interest as a psycho- 
logical revelation remains unabated. Into 
Le'lia, she owns, she put more of her real self 
than into any other of her books — of herself, 
that is, and her state of mind at the dawn of a 
period of moral disturbance and revolt. All 
must continue to recognize there an extraordi- 
nary exhibition of poetical power and musical 
style. As a work of art George Sand has her- 
self pronounced it absurd, yet she always 
cherished for it a special predilection, and, as 
will be seen, took the trouble to rewrite it some 
years later, when in a happier and healthier 
frame of mind than that which inspired this 
unique and most characteristic composition. 



S6 GEOXGE SAND. 

The note of despair struck in Lelia, the depth 
of bitter feeling, the capacity for mental and 
moral speculation and suffering it seemed to 
disclose, astounded many of her familiar ac- 
quaintance. "Lelia is a fancy-type," so writes 
to the author her friend and neighbor in Berry, 
Jules Neraud, an ardent naturalist, whose 
botanical and entomological pursuits she had 
often shared : " it is not like you — you who are 
merry, dance the bourree, appreciate lepidoptera, 
do not despise puns, who are not a bad needle- 
woman, and make very good preserves. Is it 
possible you should have thought so much, felt 
so much, without anyone having any idea of 
it ? " 

Lelia was certainly the expression of a new 
phase in her mind's history, a moral crisis she 
could not escape, which was all the more severe 
for her having, as she remarks, reached her 
thirtieth year without having opened her eyes 
to the realities of life. Till the time of her 
coming to Paris, for very dearth of outward im- 
pressions, she had lived chiefly in dreams, the 
life of all others most favorable to the pro- 
longation of ignorance and credulity. The 
liberty and activity she had enjoyed for the last 
two years were fatal to Utopian theories. 

It was not only the bitterness that springs 
from disenchantment in individuals, the sense 



LELIA — ITALIAN JO URNE Y. 87 

of the miserable insufficiency of human love to 
satisfy her spiritual aspirations producing " that 
widely concluding unbelief which," as her 
sister in greatness has said, "we call knowl- 
edge of the world, but which is really disappoint- 
ment in you and in me." George Sand was one 
to whom scepticism was intolerable. Pessimis- 
tic doctrines were fatal to her mind's equili- 
brium, and private experience and outward 
intellectual influences were driving her to dis- 
trust all objects of her previous worship, human 
and divine. The moment was one when the 
most fundamental social and religious principles 
were being called in question. 

"Nothing in my old beliefs," she writes, 
" was sufficiently formulated in me, from a 
social point of view, to help me to struggle 
against this cataclysm ; and in the religious and 
socialistic theories of the moment I did not 
find light enough to contend with the darkness." 
The poet's creed, with which her mind had 
hitherto rested satisfied, was shaken, and ap- 
peared to prove a false one. She was staggered 
by the infinity of evil, misery, and injustice, 
which dwellers in great cities are not allowed 
to forget, the problem of humanity, the eternal 
mystery of suffering and wrong predominant in 
a world on the beneficence of whose Supreme 
Power all her faiths were founded. 



88 GEORGE SAND. 

Her mental revolt and suffering found vent 
in Lelia, which it was an immense relief to her 
to write. Characteristic as an exhibition of 
feeling and of mastery of language, it is not in 
the least typical of her fiction. Yet, but for 
Lelia, and its successor Jacques, it is impossible 
to point to a work of hers that would ever have 
lastingly stamped her, in the public mind, as an 
expounder of dangerous theories. In Lttia, 
however, which is strongly imbued with Byronic 
coloring, she had chosen to pose somewhat as 
the proud angel in rebellion ; and the immediate 
effect of hostile criticism was to confirm her 
in the position taken up. Neither Le'lia nor 
Jacques combined the elements of lasting popu- 
larity with those of instant success ; but they 
roused a stir and strife which created an im- 
pression of her as a writer systematically inimi- 
cal to religion and marriage — an impression 
almost ludicrously at variance with facts, taking 
her fiction as a whole, but which has only 
recently begun to give way, in this country, to a 
juster estimate of its tendencies. 

The morality of Lelia, which it is rather 
difficult to discuss seriously in the present day, 
both the personages and their environment 
being too preternatural for any direct applica- 
tion to be drawn from them, as reflecting 
modern society, found indiscreet champions as 



LELIA — ITALIAN JOURNEY. 89 

determined as its aggressors. Violently de- 
nounced by M. Capo de Feuillide, of the Europe 
litteraire, it was warmly defended by M. Gustave 
Planche, in the Revue des Deux Mondes. The 
war of words grew so hot between them that a 
challenge and encounter were the result — 
surely unique in the annals of duelling. The 
swords of the critics fortunately proved more 
harmless than their words. 

From the morbid depression that had tor- 
mented her mind and imagination, and has its 
literary memorial in Lelia, she was to find a 
timely, though but a temporary rescue, in the 
charm of a new acquaintance — the delighting 
society of a poetic mind of an order not inferior 
to her own. 

It was in August, 1833, at a dinner given by 
Buloz to the staff of the Revue des Deux Mondes, 
that George Sand first made the personal 
acquaintance of Alfred de Musset, then in his 
twenty-third year, and already famous through 
his just published poem, Rolla, and his earlier 
dramas, Andrea del Sarto and Les Caprices de 
Marianne. He rapidly became enamored of the 
author of Lelia, who for her part felt powerfully 
the attraction of his many admirable qualities, 
mutual enchantment leading them so far as to 
believe they could be the hero and heroine of a 
happy love tale. In a letter of September 21, 



90 GEORGE SAND. 

addressed to her friend and correspondent 
Sainte-Beuve, whom she had made the confidant 
of her previous depression and strange moods of 
gloom, she writes of herself as lifted out of such 
dangers by a happiness beyond any she had 
imagined, restoring youth to her heart — the 
happiness accorded her by the poet's society 
and his preference for her own. De Musset, at 
this time, would have given the world to have 
been able to make her his wife. 

The story of their short-lived infatuation and 
of the swift-following mutual disenchantment, — 
a story which, says Sainte-Beuve, has become 
part of the romance of the nineteenth century, 
— is perhaps of less consequence here than 
in the life of De Musset, f in whom the over- 
sensitiveness of genius was not allied with the 
extraordinary healthy vitality which enabled 
George Sand to come out of the most terrible 
mental experiences unembittered, with the bal- 
ance of her mind unshaken, and her powers 
unimpaired. Yet that he acquired an empire 
over her no other ever acquired there is much 
to indicate. It took her from France for a 
while, from her children, her friends — and the 
breaking of the spell set her at war, not only 

t The biography of Alfred De Musset, by Paul De Musset, 
translated from the French by Harriet W. Preston. Boston, 
Roberts Brothers. 



L£LIA —ITALIAN JOURNEY. 91 

with him, but for a while with herself, with life, 
and her fellow creatures. 

In the last days of 1833, she and the author 
of Rolla started on a journey to Italy, where 
George Sand spent six months, and where she 
has laid the scene of a number of her novels : 
the first and best part of Consuelo, La Derniere 
Aldini, Leone, Leoni> La Daniella, and others. 
The spirit of that land she has caught and repro- 
duced perhaps more successfully than any other 
of the many novelists who have chosen it for a 
frame — of Italy as the artist's native country, 
that is — not the Italy of political history, nor of 
the Medici, but the Italy that is the second home 
of painters, poets, and musicians. Can any- 
thing be more enjoyable, and at the same time 
more vividly true, than George Sand's delinea- 
tions of Venice ; and, in the first of the Lettres 
d'un Vqyageur, the pictures given of her wan- 
derings on the shores of the Brenta, of Bas- 
sano, the Brenta valley, Oliero, Possagno, Asolo, 
a delicious land, till quite recently as little 
tourist-trodden as in 1834? What a contrast 
to the purely imaginary descriptions in Le'lia, 
written before those beauties had appeared to 
her except in dreams ! 

From Genoa the travellers journeyed to Pisa, 
Florence, and thence to Venice, where first 
George Sand felt herself really at home in Italy. 



92 GEORGE SAND. 

The architecture, the simplicity of Venetian 
life and manners, the theatres — from the opera- 
houses, where Pasta and Donzelli were singing, 
down to the national drama of Pulchinello — 
the pictures, the sea, the climate, combined to 
make of it a place of residence so perfectly to 
her mind, that again and again in her letters 
she expresses her wish that she could bring over 
her children and there fix her abode. 

" It is the only town I can love for its own 
sake," she says of it. "Other cities are like 
prisons, which you put up with for the sake of 
your fellow-prisoners." This Italian journey 
marks a fresh stage in her artistic development, 
quite apart from the attendant romantic circum- 
stances, the alleged disastrous consequences to 
a child of genius less wise and fortunate than 
herself, which has given an otherwise dispro- 
portionate notoriety to this brief episode. 

George Sand was no doubt fatally in error 
when she persuaded herself, and even succeeded 
in persuading the poet's anxious mother, that 
she had it in her to be his guardian angel, and 
reform him miraculously in a short space of 
time ; and that because he had fallen in love 
with her^she would know how to make him alter 
a way of life he had no abiding desire to aban- 
don. Such a task demands a readiness not 
merely for self-sacrifice, but for self -suppression ; 



LELIA — ITALIAN JO URNE V. 93 

and her individuality was far too pronounced to 
merge itself for long in ministering to another's. 
She never seems to have possessed the slightest 
moral ascendancy over him, beyond the power 
of wounding him very deeply by the change in 
her sentiments, however much he might feel 
himself to blame for it. 

The history of the separation of the lovers — 
of De Musset's illness, jealousy, and departure 
from Venice alone — is a thrice-told tale. Like 
the subject of "The Ring and the Book," it has 
been set forth, by various persons, variously 
interested, with correspondingly various color- 
ing. The story, as told by George Sand in her 
later novel, Elle et Lui, is substantially the 
same as one related by De Musset in his Con- 
fession <Vun Enfant du Steele, published two 
years after these events, and in which, if it is to 
be regarded as reflecting personal idiosyncrasies 
in the slightest degree, the poet certainly makes 
himself out as the most insupportable of human 
companions. None the less did the publication 
of Elle et Lui, a quarter of a century later, pro- 
voke a savage retort from the deceased poet's 
brother, in Lui et Elle. Finally, in Lui, a third 
novelist, Madame Colet, presented the world 
with a separate version of the affair from one • 
who imagined she could have made up to the 
poet for what he had lost. 



94 GEORGE SAND. 

But it needs no deep study of human nature, 
or yet of these novels, to understand the imprac- 
ticability of two such minds long remaining 
together in unity. Genius, in private life, is 
apt to be a torment — its foibles demanding 
infinite patience, forbearance, nay, affectionate 
blindness, in those who would minister to its 
happiness, and mitigate the worst results of 
those foibles themselves. Certainly George 
Sand, for a genius, was a wonderfully equable 
character ; her " satanic" moods showed them- 
selves chiefly in pen and ink ; her nerves were 
very strong, the balance of her physical and 
mental organization was splendidly even, as 
one imagines Shakespeare's to have been. But 
the very vigor of her character, its force of self- 
assertion, unfitted her to be the complement to 
any but a very yielding nature. The direct 
influence a passive, merely receptive spirit 
would have accepted, and gratefully, was soon 
felt as an intolerable burden by a mind in many 
ways different from her own, but with the same 
imperious instinct of freedom, and as little cap- 
able of playing anvil to another mind for long. 
He rebelled against her ascendancy, but suf- 
fered from the spell. She was no Countess 
Guiccioli, content to adore and be adored, and 
exercise an indirect power for good on a capri- 
cious lover. Her logical mind, energetic and 



L£LIA— ITALIAN JOURNEY. 95 

independent, grew impatient of the seeming 
inconsistencies of her gifted companion ; and 
when at last she began to perceive in them the 
fatal conditions of those gifts themselves, only- 
compassion survived in her, as she thought, and 
compassion was cold. 

How could De Musset, with such an excellent 
example of prudence, regular hours, good sense, 
calm self-possession, and ceaseless literary in- 
dustry as hers before his eyes, not be stirred up 
to emulate such admirable qualities ? But her 
reason made him unreasonable ; the indefatiga- 
bility of her pen irritated his nerves, and made 
him idle out of contradiction ; her homilies pro- 
voked only fresh imprudences — as though he 
wanted to make proof of his independence 
whilst secretly feeling her dominion — a phe- 
nomenon with which highly nervous people will 
sympathize not a little, but which was perfectly 
inexplicable to George Sand. 

His genius was of a more delicate essence 
than hers ; he has struck, at times, a deeper 
note. But his nature was frailer, his muse not 
so easily within call, his character as intolerant 
of restraint as her own, but less self-sufficing ; 
and the morbid taint of thought then prevalent, 
and which her natural optimism and better 
balanced faculties enabled her to throw off very 
shortly, had entered into him ineffaceably. 



96 GEORGE SAND. 

Whether or not she brought a fresh blight on 
his mind, she certaintly failed to cure it. 

The spring had hardly begun when De 
Musset was struck down by fever. George 
Sand, who had previously been very ill herself, 
nursed him through his attack with great devo- 
tion ; and in six weeks' time he was restored to 
health, if not to happiness. Theirs was at an 
end, as they recognized, and agreed to part — 
"for a time, perhaps, or perhaps for ever," she 
wrote, — with their attachment broken but not 
destroyed. 

It was early in April that De Musset started 
on his homeward journey. George Sand saw 
him on his way as far as Vicenza, and ere 
returning to Venice, made a little excursion in 
the Alps, along the course of the Brenta. " I 
have walked as much as four-and-twenty miles 
a day," she writes to M. Boucoiran, "and found 
out that this sort of exercise is very good for me, 
both morally and physically. Tell Buloz I will 
write some letters for the Revue, upon my 
pedestrian tours. I came back into Venice 
with only seven centimes in my pocket, other- 
wise I should have gone as far as the Tyrol; 
but the want of baggage and money obliged me 
to return. In a few days I shall start again, 
and cross over the Alps by the gorges of the 
Piave." 



L£LIA — ITALIAN JO URNE V. gy 

And the spring's delights on the Alpine 
borders of Lombardy are described by her con 
amove, in the promised letters : — 

The country was not yet in its full splendor; the 
fields were of a faint green, verging on yellow, and the 
leaves only coming into bud on the trees. But here 
and there the almonds and peaches in flower mixed 
their garlands of pink and white with the dark clumps of 
cypress. Through the midst of this far-spreading garden 
the Brenta flowed swiftly and silently over her sandy 
bed, between two large banks of pebbles, and the rocky 
debris which she tears out of the heart of the Alps, and 
with which she furrows the plains in her days of anger. 
A semi-circle of fertile hills, overspread with those long 
festoons of twisting vine that suspend themselves from 
all the trees in Venetia, made a near frame to the picture; 
and the snowy mountain-heights, sparkling in the first 
rays of sunshine, formed an immense second border, 
standing, as if cut out in silver, against the solid blue of 
the sky. 

None of these excursions, however, were ever 
carried very far. For the next three months 
she remained almost entirely stationary at 
Venice, her head-quarters. She had taken 
apartments for herself in the interior of the city, 
in a little low-built house, along the narrow, 
green, and yet limpid canal, close to the Ponte 
dei Barcaroli. "There," she tells us, "alone all 
the afternoon, never going out except in the 
evening for a breath of air, working at night as 
4 



V. 



98 GEORGE SAND. 

• **\ , 

well, to the song of the tame nightingales that 

people all Venetian balconies, I wrote Andre', 
Jacques, Mattea, and the first Le tires (Tun Voy- 
ageur." 

None can read the latter and suppose that the 
suffering of the recent parting was all on one 
side. The poet continued to correspond with 
her, and the consciousness of the pain she had 
inflicted she was clearly not sufficiently indif- 
ferent herself to support. But neither De 
Musset nor any other in whom, through the 
"prism of enthusiasm," she may have seen 
awhile a hero of romance, was ever a primary 
influence on her life. These were two. Firstly, 
her children, who although at a distance were 
seldom absent from her thoughts. Of their 
well-being at school and at home respectively, 
she was careful to keep herself informed, down 
to the minutest particulars, by correspondents 
in Paris and at Nohant, whence no opposition 
whatever was raised by its occupier to her pro- 
longed absence abroad. Secondly, her art- 
vocation. She wrote incessantly ; and inde- 
pendently of the pecuniary obligations to do so 
which she put forward, it is obvious that she 
had become wedded to this habit of work. 
" The habit has become a faculty — the faculty 
a need. I have thus come to working for 
thirteen hours at a time without making myself 



L£LIA — ITALIAN JOURNE Y. 99 

ill ; seven or eight a day on an average, be the 
task done better or worse," she writes to M. 
Chatiron, from Venice, in March. Sometimes, 
as with Leone Leoni, she would complete a novel 
in a week ; a few weeks later it was in the 
Revue des Deux Mondes. Such haste she after- 
ward deprecated, and, like all other workers, 
she aspired to a year's holiday in which to 
devote herself to the study of the masterpieces 
of modern literature ; but the convenient season 
for such suspension of her own productive 
activity never came. And whilst at Venice she 
found herself literally in want of money to leave 
it. Buloz had arranged with her that she 
should contribute thirty-two pages every six 
weeks to his periodical for a yearly stipend of 
.£160. She had anticipated her salary for the 
expenses of her Italian journey, and must acquit 
herself of the arrears due before she could take 
wing. 

Jacques, the longest pi the novels written at 
Venice, afforded fresh grounds to those who 
taxed her works with hostility to social institu- 
tions. Without entering into the vexed ques- 
tion of the right of the artist in search of variety 
to exercise his power on any theme that may 
invite to its display, and of the precise bearing 
of ethical rules on works of imagination, it is 
permissible to doubt that Jacques, however 



IOO GEORGE SAND. 

bitter the sentiments of the author at that time 
regarding the marriage tie, ever seriously dis- 
turbed the felicity of any domestic household in 
the past or present day. It is too lengthy and 
too melancholy to attract modern readers, who 
care little to revel in the luxuries of woe, so 
relished by those of a former age. We cannot 
do better than quote the judgment pronounced 
by Madame Sand herself, thirty years later, on 
this work of pure sentimentalism — generated 
by an epoch thrown into commotion by the 
passionate views of romanticism — the epoch 
of Rene, Lara, Childe Harold, Werther, types 
of desperate men ; life weary, but by no means 
weary of talking. "Jacques" she observes, 
" belonged to. this large family of disillusioned 
thinkers ; they had their raison d'etre, historical 
and social. He comes on the scene in the 
noyel, already worn by deceptions ; he thought 
to revive through his love, and he does not re- 
vive. Marriage was for him only the drop of 
bitterness that made the cup overflow. He 
killed himself to bequeath to others the hap- 
piness for which he cared not, and in which he 
believed not." 

Jacques, taken as a plaidoyer against domestic 
institutions, singularly misses its aim. As 
critics have remarked, some of the most elo- 
quent pages are those that treat of married 



LELIA —ITALIAN JOURNEY. 101 

bliss. Our sympathies are entirely with the 
wronged husband against his silly little wife. 
It is a kindred work to Lttia, and its faults are 
the same; but whilst dealing ostensibly with 
real life and possible human beings it cannot 
like Lelia, be placed apart, and retain interest 
as a literary curiosity. 

Andre \s a very different piece of work and a 
little masterpiece of its kind. The author, in 
her preface, tells us how, whilst mechanically 
listening to the incessant chatter of the Vene- 
tian sempstresses in the next room to her own, 
she was struck by the resemblance between the 
mode of life and thought their talk betrayed, 
and that of the same class of girls at La Chatre ; 
and how in the midst of Venice, to the sound of 
the rippling waters stirred by the gondolier's 
oar, of guitar and serenade, and within sight of 
the marble palaces, her thoughts flew back to 
the dark and dirty streets, the dilapidated 
houses, the wretched moss-grown roofs, the 
shrill concerts of the cocks, cats, and children 
of the little French provincial town. She 
dreamt also of the lovely meadows, the scented 
hay, the little running streams, and the floral 
researches she had been fond of. This tenacity 
of her instincts was a safeguard .she may have 
sometimes rebelled against as a chain ; it was 
with her an essential feature, and, despite all 
vagaries, gave a great unity to her life. 



102 GEORGE SAND. 

"Venice," she writes to M. Chatiron in June, 
" with her marble staircases and her wonderful 
climate, does not make me forget anything that 
has been dear to me. Be sure that nothing in 
me dies. My life has its agitations ; destiny 
pushes me different ways, but my heart does 
not repudiate the past. Old memories have a 
power none can ignore, and myself less than 
another. I love on the contrary to recall them, 
and we shall soon find ourselves together again 
in the old nest at Nohant." Andre she con- 
sidered the outcome of this feeling of nostalgia. 
In it she has put together the vulgar elements 
of inferior society in a common-place country 
town, and produced a poem, though one of the 
saddest. If the florist heroine, Genevieve, is 
a slightly idealized figure, the story and general 
character-treatment are realistic to a painful 
degree. There is more power of simple pathos 
shown here than is common in the works of 
George Sand. Andre' is a refreshing contrast, 
in its simplicity and brevity, to the inflation of 
Ldia and Jacques. It was an initial essay, and 
a model one, in a style with better claims to 
enduring popularity. 

As the summer advanced, George Sand found 
herself free to depart, and started on her way 
back to France, famishing, as she tells us, for 
the sight of her children. Her grand anxiety 



LELIA —ITALIAN JOURNEY. 103 

was to reach her destination in time for the 
breaking-up day and distribution of prizes at 
the College Henri IV. " I shall be at Paris 
before then," she writes from Milan, to her son, 
" if I die on the way, and really the heat is such 
that one might die of it." From Milan she 
journeyed over the Simplon to the Rhone val- 
ley, Martigny, Chamounix, and Geneva, perform- 
ing great part of the way on foot. She reached 
Paris in the middle of August, and a few days 
later started with her boy for Nohant, where 
Solange had spent the time during her mother's 
absence, and where they remained together for 
the holidays. Here too she was in the midst 
of a numerous circle of friends of both sexes, 
in whose staunch friendliness she found a solace 
of which she stood in real need. 



CHAPTER V. 



MENTAL DEVELOPMENT. 



The period immediately following George 
Sand's return from Italy in August 1834, was a 
time of transition, both in her outer and inner 
life. If undistinguished by the production of 
any novel calculated to create a fresh sensation, 
it shows no abatement of literary activity. 
This, as we have seen, had become to her a 
necessity of nature. Neither vicissitudes with- 
out nor commotions within, though they might 
direct or stimulate, seem to have acted as a 
check on the flow of her pen. 

During the first twelvemonth she continued 
to reside alternately at Nohant, whither she 
came with her son and daughter for their holi- 
days — Solange being now placed in a children's 
school kept by some English ladies at Paris, — 
and her "poet's garret," as she styled her third 
floor appartement on the Quai Malplaquet. 

This winter saw the ending for herself and 
De Musset of their hapless romance. An 
approach to complete reconciliation — for the 



MENTAL DEVELOPMENT. 105 

existing partial enstrangement had been dis- 
covered to be more unbearable than all besides 
— - led to stormy scenes and violent discord, and 
resulted before very long in mutual avoidance, 
which was to be final. It is said that forgive- 
ness is the property of the injured, and it 
should be remembered that whenever De 
Musset's name is mentioned by George Sand it 
is with the admiring respect of one to whom 
his genius made that name sacred, and who 
refused to the end of his life to use the easy 
weapon offered her by his notorious frailties for 
vindicating herself at his expense. And, how- 
ever pernicious the much talked of effect on De 
Musset's mind, it is but fair to the poet to 
recollect that it is no less true of him than of 
George Sand that his best work, that with 
which his fame has come chiefly to associate 
itself, was accomplished after this painful 
experience. 

Into her own mental state — possibly at this 
time the least enviable of the two — we get 
some glimpses in the Lettres d'un Voyageur of 
the autumn 1834, and winter 1834-35. Here, 
again, we should be content with gathering a 
general impression, and not ingenuously read 
literal facts in all the self-accusations and 
recorded experiences of the "voyageur" — a 
semi-fictitious personage whose improvisations 



106 GEORGE SAND. 

were, after all, only a fresh exercise which 
George Sand had invented for her imagination 
taking herself and reality for a starting-point 
merely, a suggestive theme. 

But the despair and disgust of life, to which 
both these and her private letters give such 
uncompromising and eloquent expression, indu- 
bitably reflect her feelings at this moral crisis — 
the feelings of one who having openly braved 
the laws of society, to become henceforward a 
law unto herself, recognizes that she has only 
found her way to fresh sources of misery. 
Never yet had she had such grave and deep 
causes of individual mental torment to blacken 
her views of existence, and incline her to abhor 
it as a curse. "Your instinct will save you, 
bring you back to your children," wrote a friend 
who knew her well. But her maternal love 
and solicitude themselves were becoming a 
source of added distress and apprehension. 

The extraordinary arrangement she and M. 
Dudevant had entered into four years before 
with regard to each other, was clearly one 
impossible to last. It will be recollected that 
she at that time had relinquished her patrimony 
to those who had thought it no dishonor to con- 
tinue to enjoy it ; and the terms of that agree- 
ment had since been nominally undisturbed. 
But besides that, the control of the children 



MENTAL DEVELOPMENT. 107 

remained a constant subject of dissension. M. 
Dudevant was beginning to get into pecuniary 
difficulties in the management of his wife's 
estate. Sometimes he contemplated resigning 
it to her, and retiring to Gascony, to live with 
his widowed stepmother on the property which 
at her death would revert to him. But unfor- 
tunately he could not make up his mind to this 
course. No sooner had he drawn up an agree- 
ment consenting to a division of property, than 
he seemed to regret the sacrifice ; upon which 
she ceased to press it. 

Meantime Madame Dudevant, whose position 
at Nohant was that of a visitor merely, and 
becoming untenable, felt her hold on her cher- 
ished home and her children becoming more 
precarious day by day. 

Some of her friends had strongly advised her 
to travel for a length of time, both as offering 
a mortal remedy, and as a temporary escape from 
the practical perplexities of the moment. Her 
rescue, however, was to be otherwise effected, 
and a number of new intellectual interests that 
sprang up for her at this time all tended to 
retain her in her own country. 

It was in the course of this spring that she 
made the acquaintance of M. de Lamennais, 
introduced to her by their common friend, the 
composer, Franz Liszt. The famous author of 



108 GEORGE SAND. 

the Paroles (Tun Croyant had virtually severed 
himself from the Church of Rome by his recent 
publication of this little volume, pronounced by 
the Pope, " small in size, immense in perver- 
sity ! " The eloquence of the poet-priest, and 
the doctrines of the anti-Catholic and human- 
itarian Christianity of which he came forward 
as the expounder, could not fail powerfully to 
impress her intelligence. Here seemed the 
harbor of refuge her half-wrecked faiths were 
seeking, and what the abbe's antagonists de- 
nounced as the " diabolical gospel of social 
science," came to her as the teachings of an 
angel of light. Christianity as preached by him 
was a sort of realization of the ideal religion of 
Aurore Dupin — faith divorced from supersti- 
tion and the doctrine of Romish infallibility. 
Complete identity of sentiments between her- 
self and the abbe was out of the question. But 
his was the right mind coming to her mind at the 
right moment, and exercised a healing influence 
over her troubled spirits. For Le Monde, a 
journal founded by him shortly after this time, 
she wrote the Le tires a Marcie, an unfinished 
series, treating of moral and spiritual problems 
and trials. Finally, the position M. de Lamen- 
nais had taken up as the apostle of the people 
further enlisted her sympathies in his cause, 
which made religious one with social reform, 



MENTAL DEVELOPMENT. 109 

and amalgamated the protest against moral 
enslavement with the liberation-schemes then 
fermenting in young and generous minds all 
over Europe. 

The belief in the possibility of their speedy 
realization was then wide-spread — a conviction 
that, as Heine puts it, some grand recipe for 
freedom and equality, invented, well drawn up, 
and inserted in the Moniteur, was all that was 
needed to secure those benefits for the world at 
large. If George Sand, led afterwards into 
searching for this empirical remedy for the 
wrongs and sufferings of the masses, believed 
the elixir to have been found in the establish- 
ment of popular sovereignty by universal suf- 
frage, it was through the persuasive arguments 
of the leaders of the movement, with whom at 
this period she was first brought into personal 
relations. Her own unbiassed judgment, to 
which she reverted long years after, when she 
had seen these illusions perish sadly, was less 
sanguine in its prognostications for the imme- 
diate future, as appears in her own reflections 
in a letter of this time : — 



What I see in the midst of the divergencies of all these 
reforming sects is a waste of generous sentiments and of 
noble thoughts, a tendency towards social amelioration, 
but an impossibility for the time to bring forth through 
the want of a head to that great body with a hundred 



HO GEORGE SAND. 

hands, that tears itself to pieces, for not knowing what to 
attack. So far the struggles make only dust and noise. 
We have not yet come to the era that will construct new 
societies, and people them with perfected men. 

She had recently been introduced to a politi- 
cal and legal celebrity of his day, the famous 
advocate Michel, of Bourges. He was then at 
the height of his reputation, which, won by his 
eloquent and successful defense of political pris- 
oners on various occasions, was considerable. 
Madame Sand had been advised to consult him 
professionally about her business affairs, and for 
this purpose went over one day with some of 
her Berrichon friends to see him at Bourges. 
But the man of law had, it appears, been read- 
ing Le'lia, and instead of talking of business 
with his distinguished client, dashed at once into 
politics, philosophy, and 'social science, over- 
powering his listeners with the strength of his 
oratory. His sentiments were those of extreme 
radicalism, and he carried on a little private pro- 
paganda in the country around. The force of his 
character seems to have spent itself in oratori- 
cal effort. He could preach revolution, but not 
suggest reform ; denounce existing abuses, but 
do nothing towards the remodelling of social 
institutions ; and in after years he failed, as so 
many leading men in his profession have failed, 
to make any impression as a speaker in Parlia- 



MENTAL DEVELOPMENT. Ill 

ment. The author of Lelia was overwhelmed, 
if not all at once converted, by the tremendous 
rhetorical power of this singular man. She was 
a proselyte worth the trouble of making, and 
Michel was bent on drawing her more closely 
into active politics, with which hitherto she had 
occupied herself very little. He began a corre- 
spondence, writing her long epistles, the sum of 
which, she says, may thus be resumed : — "Your 
scepticism springs from personal unhappiness. 
Love is selfish. Extend this solicitude for a 
single individual to the whole human race." 
He certainly succeeded in inspiring her with a 
strong desire to share his passion for politics, 
his faith, his revivifying hopes of a speedy social 
renovation, his ambition to be one of its apostles. 
To Michel, under the sobriquet of " Everard," 
are addressed several of the Lettres ctun Voy- 
ageur of the spring and summer of 1835, letters 
which she defines as "a rapid analysis of a 
rapid conversion." 

But Michel's work was a work of demolition 
only ; and when his earnest disciple wanted new 
theories in place of the old forms so ruthlessly 
destroyed, he had none to offer. There were 
others, however, who could. She was soon to 
be put into communication with a number of 
the active workers for the republican cause 
throughout the country. They counted many 



112 GEORGE SAND. 

of the best hearts and not the worst heads in 
France, and were naturally eager to enlist her 
energies on their side. 

Foremost, by right of the influence exercised 
over her awhile by his writings, was the phi- 
losopher Pierre Leroux, with whom her acquaint- 
ance dates from this same year. In spite of 
the wide divergence between her pre-eminently 
artistic spirit and a mind of the rougher stamp 
of this born iconoclast, he was to indoctrinate 
her with many new opinions. His disinterested 
character won her admiration ; he was a prac- 
tical philanthropist as well as a critical thinker, 
one whose life and fighting power were devoted 
to promoting the good of the working classes 
to whom he belonged, having been brought up 
as a printer. He was regarded as the apostle 
of communism, as then understood, or rather 
not understood — for the form under which it 
suggested itself to the social reformers of the 
period in question was entirely indefinite. 

Meantime the novelist's pen was far from idle. 
One or two pleasant glimpses she has given us 
into her manner of working belong to this 
year. In the summer the heat in her "poet's 
garret " becoming intolerable, she took refuge 
in a congenial solitude offered by the ground- 
floor apartments of the house, then in course of 
reconstruction, dismantled and untenanted. The 



MENTAL DEVELOPMENT. 113 

works had been temporarily suspended, and 
Madame Sand took possession of the field aban- 
doned by the builders and carpenters. The 
windows and doors opening into the garden had 
been taken away, and the place thus turned 
into an airy, cool retreat. Out of the apparatus 
of the workmen, left behind, she constructed 
her writing-establishment, and here, secure 
from interruption, denying herself to all visitors, 
never going out except to visit her children at 
their respective schools, she completed her 
novel with no companions but the spiders 
crawling over the planks, the mice running in 
and out of the corners, and the blackbirds 
hopping in from the garden ; the deep sense of 
solitude enhanced by the roar of the city in the 
very heart of which she had thus voluntarily 
isolated herself. 

As an artistic experience she found it re- 
freshing, and repeated it more than once. 
Soon after, a friend offered her the loan of an 
empty house at Bourges, a town that had been 
suggested to her as a desirable place of resi- 
dence, should the circumstances at Nohant ever 
force her to abandon it entirely. As a home 
she saw and disapproved of Bourges, but she 
thoroughly enjoyed a brief retreat spent there 
in an absolutely deserted, vine-covered dwelling/ 
standing in a garden enclosed by stone walls. 



114 GEORGE SAND. 

Her meals were handed in through a wicket. 
A few friends came to see her in the evenings. 
The days, and often the nights, she passed in 
study and meditation, shut up in the library 
reading Lavater, expatiating on her impressions 
of his theories in a letter addressed to Franz 
Liszt (inserted among the Lettres (Tun Voya- 
geur), or strolling in the flower garden — "for- 
gotten," she tells us, " by the whole world, and 
plunged into oblivion of the actualities of my 
own existence." 

Of her numerous letters of advice to her boy 
at school, we quote one written during this 
summer of 1835, when their future relations to 
each other were in painful uncertainty : — 

Work, be strong and proud ; despise the little troubles 
supposed to belong to your age. Reserve your strength 
of resistance for deeds and facts that are worth the effort. 
If I am here no longer, think of me who worked and 
suffered cheerfully. We are like each other in mind and 
in countenance. I know already from this day what your 
intellectual life will be. I fear for you many and deep 
sorrows. I hope for you the purest of joys. Guard 
within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to 
give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how 
to acquire without meanness. Know how to replace in 
your heart, by the happiness of those you love, the happi- 
ness that may be wanting to yourself. Keep the hope of 
another life. It is there that mothers meet their sons 
again. Love all God's creatures. Forgive those who 
are ill-conditioned, resist those who are unjust, and de- 



MENTAL DEVELOPMENT. 115 

vote yourself to those who are great through their virtue. 
Love me. I will teach you many, many things if we live 
together. If that blessing (the greatest that can befall 
me, the only one that makes me wish for a long life) is 
not to be, you must pray for me, and from the grave 
itself, if anything remains of me in the universe, the spirit 
of your mother will watch over you. 

In the autumn, 1835, Madame Dudevant, 
under legal advice, and supported by the 
approval of friends of both parties, determined 
to apply to the courts for a judicial separation 
from her husband, on the plea of ill-treatment. 
She had sufficient grounds to allege for her 
claim, and had then every reason to hope that 
her demand would not even be contested by 
M. Dudevant, who, on former occasions, had 
voluntarily signed but afterwards revoked the 
agreement she hereby only desired to make 
valid and permanent, and which, ensuring to 
him a certain proportion of her income, gave 
her Nohant for a place of habitation, and 
established the children under her care. 

Pending the issue of this suit, which, unex- 
pectedly protracted, dragged on until the sum- 
mer of the next year, she availed herself of the 
hospitality of a family at La Chatre, friends of 
old standing, and from under whose roof she 
awaited, as from a neutral ground, the decision 
of her judges. During this year she saw little 



Il6 GEORGE SAND. 

of Paris, and less of Nohant, except for a brief 
visit which, profiting by a moment when its 
walls were absolutely deserted by every other 
human being, she paid to her house — not 
knowing then whether she would ever, so to 
speak, inhabit it again in her own right. 

On the result of the legal proceedings 
depended her future home and the best part 
of her happiness. Sooner than be parted from 
her children, she contemplated the idea, in case 
of the decision going against her, of escaping 
with them to America ! Yet, in the midst of 
all this suspense,, we find her industrious as 
ever, joining in the day-time in the family life 
of the household with which she was domesti- 
cated, helping to amuse the children among 
them, retiring to her room at ten at night, to 
work on at her desk till seven in the morning, 
according to her wont. A more cheerful tone 
begins to pervade her effusions. The clouds 
were slowly breaking on all sides at once, and 
a variety of circumstances combining to restore 
to her mind its natural tone — faith, hope, and 
charity to her heart, and harmony to her exis- 
tence. She began to perceive what she was 
enabled afterwards more fully to acknowledge 
as follows : — 

As to my religion, the ground of it has never varied. 
The forms of the past have vanished, for me as for my 



MENTAL DEVELOPMENT. WJ 

century, before the light of study and reflection. But 
the eternal doctrine of believers, of God and His good- 
ness, the immortal soul and the hopes of another life, 
this is what, in myself, has been proof against all exami- 
nation, all discussion, and even intervals of despairing 
doubt. 

It is significant that during these months, 
spent for the most part at La Chatre, we find 
her rewriting Lelia, trying, as she expressed 
her intention, " to transform this work of anger 
into a work of gentleness." Engelwald> a novel 
of some length on which she was engaged, was 
destined never to see the light. 

To the Comtesse d'Agoult, better known by 
her nom de plume of Daniel Stern, whose 
acquaintance she had recently made in Paris, 
she writes in May, 1836 : — 

I am still at La Chatre, staying with my friends, who 
spoil me like a child of five years old. I inhabit a 
suburb, built in terraces against the rock. At my feet 
lies a wonderfully pretty valley. A garden thirty feet 
square and full of roses, and a terrace extensive enough 
for you to walk along it in ten steps, are my drawing- 
room, my study, and gallery. My bed-room is rather 
large — it is decorated with a red cotton curtained bed — 
a real peasant's bed, hard and flat, two straw chairs, and 
a white wooden table. My window is situated six feet 
above the terrace. By the trellised trees on the wall I 
can get out and in, and stroll at night among my thirty feet 
of flowers without having to open a door or wake anyone. 

Sometimes I go out riding alone, at dusk. I come in 



Il8 GEORGE SAND. 

towards midnight. My cloak, my rough hat, and the 
melancholy trot of my nag, make me pass in the dark- 
ness for a commercial traveller, or a farm-boy. 

One of my grand amusements is to watch the transition 
from night to day; it effects itself in a thousand different 
manners. This revolution, apparently so uniform, has 
every day a character of its own. 

The summer that had set in was unusually 
hot and sultry. Writing to Madame d'Agoult, 
July io, 1836, she thus describes her enjoyment 
of a season that allowed of some of the pleasures 
of primitive existence : — 

I start on foot at three in the morning, fully intending 
to be back by eight o'clock ; but I lose myself in the 
lanes; I forget myself on the banks of the river; I run 
after butterflies; and I get home at midday in a state of 
torrefaction impossible to describe. 

Another time the sight of the cooling stream 
is more than she can resist, and she walks into 
the Indre fully dressed ; but a few minutes more 
and the sun has dried her garments, and she 
proceeds on her walk of ten or twelve miles — 
"Never a cockchafer passes but I run after it." 

You have no idea of all the dreams I dream during my 
walks in the sun. I fancy myself in the golden days of 
Greece. In this happy country where I live you may 
often go for six miles without meeting a human creature. 
The flocks are left by themselves in pastures well enclosed 
by fine hedges ; so the illusion can last for some time. 



MENTAL DEVELOPMENT. 119 

One of my chief amusements when I have got out to 
some distance, where I don't know the paths, is to fancy 
I am wandering over some other country with which I 
discover some resemblance. I recollect having strolled 
in the Alps, and fancied myself for hours in America. 
Now I picture to myself an Arcadia in Berry. Not a 
meadow, not a cluster of trees which, under so fine a 
sun, does not appear to me quite Arcadian. 

We give these passages because they seem to 
us very forcibly to portray one side, and that 
the strongest and most permanent, of the char- 
acter of George Sand : the admixture of a 
child's simplicity of tastes, a poet's fondness for 
reverie, and that instinctive independence of 
habits — an instinct stronger than the restraints 
of custom — which her individuality seemed to 
demand. 

In the letter last quoted to Madame d' Agoult, 
the new ideal which was arising out of these 
contemplations is thus resumed : — 

To throw yourself into the lap of mother nature : to 
take her really for mother and sister ; stoically and relig- 
iously to cut off from your life what is mere gratified 
vanity; obstinately to resist the proud and the wicked; to 
make yourself humble with the unfortunate, to weep with 
the misery of the poor; nor desire another consolation 
than the putting down of the rich ; to acknowledge no 
other God than Him who ordains justice and equality 
upon men; to venerate what is good, to judge severely 
what is only strong, to live on very little, to give away 
nearly all, in order to re-establish primitive equality and 



120 GEORGE SAND. 

bring back to life again the Divine institution : that is 
the religion I shall proclaim in a little corner of my own, 
and that I aspire to preach to my twelve apostles under 
the lime-trees in my garden. 

The judgment of the court, first pronounced 
in February, 1836, and given in her favor by 
default, no opposition having been raised to her 
claims to the proposed partition of property by 
the defendant, placed her in legal possession of 
her house and her children. Appeal was made, 
however, prolonging and complicating the case, 
but without affecting its termination. In the 
war of mutual accusations thus stirred up, M. 
Dudevant's role as accuser, yet objecting in the 
same breath to the separation, had an appear- 
ance of insincerity that could not fail to with- 
draw sympathy from his side, irrespective of any 
judgment that might be held on the conduct of 
the wife, whose absence and complete independ- 
ence he had authorized or acquiesced in. Before 
the actual conclusion of the law-suit his appeal 
was withdrawn. As a result, the previous judg- 
ment in favor of Madame Dudevant was virtu- 
ally confirmed, and the details were settled by 
private agreement. 

It is almost impossible to overrate the impor- 
tance to George Sand of a conclusion that gave 
her back her old home of Nohant, and secured 
to her the permanent companionship of her 



MENTAL DEVELOPMENT. 121 

children. The present pecuniary arrangement 
left M. Dudevant some hold over Maurice and 
his education, concerning which his parents had 
long disagreed, and which for another year 
remained a source of contention. 

The affair thus concluded, Madame Sand 
entered formally into possession of Nohant ; 
and early in September she started with her two 
children for Switzerland, where they spent the 
autumn holidays in a long-contemplated visit to 
her friend the Comtesse d' Agoult, then at Geneva. 
This tour is fancifully sketched in a closing 
number of the Lettres d'un Voyageur, a volume 
which stands as a sort of literary memorial of 
two years of unsettled, precarious existence, 
material and spiritual — a time of trial now 
happily at an end. 

Simon, a tale dedicated to Madame d'AgoUlt, 
and published in the Revue des Deux Mondes, 
1836 — a graceful story, of no high pretentions 
— is noticeable as marking the commencement 
of a decided and agreeable change in the tone of 
George Sand's fiction. Hitherto the predomi- 
nant note struck had been most often one of 
melancholy, if not despair — the more hopelessly 
painful the subj ect, the more fervent, apparently, 
the inspiration to the writer. In Indiana she 
had, portrayed, the double victim of tyranny and 
treachery ; in Valentine, a helpless girl sacrificed 



122 GEORGE SAND. 

to family ambition and social prejudice; in 
Le'lia and Jacques, the incurable Weltschmerz> 
heroism unvalued and wasted ; in Leone Leoni, 
the infatuation of a weak-minded woman for a 
phenomenal scoundrel ; in Andre, the wretched- 
ness which a timid, selfish character, however 
amiable, may bring down on itself and on all 
connected with it. Henceforward she prefers 
themes of a pleasanter nature. In Simon she 
paints the triumph of true and patient love over 
social prejudice and strong opposition. In 
Mauprat* written in 1837, at Nohant, she exerts 
all the force of her imagination and language to 
bring before us vividly the gradual redemption 
of a noble but degraded nature, through the 
influence of an exclusive, passionate and inde- 
structible affection. The natural optimism of 
her temperament, not her incidental misfortunes, 
began and continued to color her compositions. 
From Switzerland she returned for part of 
the winter to Paris. She had given up her 
"poet's garret," and occupied for a while a 
suite of rooms in the Hotel de France, where 
resided also Madame d'Agoult. The salon of 
the latter wac a favorite rendezvous of cosmo- 
politan artistic celebrities, whose general ren- 
dezvous just then was Paris. A very Pantheon 

* Mauprat, translated by Miss Vaughan. Boston, Roberts 
Brothers. 



MENTAL DEVELOPMENT. 1 23 

must have been an intimate circle that included, 
among others, George Sand, Daniel Stern, 
Heine, the Polish poet Mickiewicz, Eugene 
Delacroix, Meyerbeer, Listz, Hiller, and 
Frederic Chopin. 

The delicate health of her son forced Madame 
Sand to leave with him shortly for Berry, where 
he soon became convalescent. Later in the 
season, some of the same party of friends that 
had met in Paris met again at Nohant. It was 
during this summer that George Sand wrote 
for her child the well-known little tale, Les 
Maitres Mosaistes, in which the adventures of 
the Venetian mosaic-workers are woven into so 
charming a picture. " I do not know why, but 
it is seldom that I have written anything with 
so much pleasure," she tells us. "It was in 
the country, in summer weather, as hot as the 
Italian climate I had lately left. I have never 
seen so many birds and flowers in my garden. 
Liszt was playing the piano on the ground 
floor, and the nightingales, intoxicated with 
music and sunshine, were singing madly in the 
lilac-trees around." 

The party was abruptly dispersed upon the 
intelligence that reached Madame Sand of her 
mother's sudden, and, as it proved, fatal illness. 
She hurried to Paris, and remained with 
Madame Maurice Dupin during her last days. 



124 GEORGE SAND. 

The old fond affection between them, though 
fitful in its manifestations on the part of the 
mother, had never been impaired, and the 
breaking of this old link with the past was 
very deeply felt by Madame Sand. 

Before returning to Nohant, she spent a few 
weeks at Fontainebleau with her son, from 
whom she never liked to separate. They 
passed their, days in exploring the forest, then 
larger and wilder than now, botanizing and 
butterfly-hunting. At night she sat up writing, 
when all was quiet in the inn. Just as, whilst 
at Venice, her fancy flew back to the scenes 
and characters of French provincial life, and 
Andre was the result, so here, amid the forest 
landscapes of her own land, her imagination 
rushed off to Venice and the shores of the 
Brenta, and produced La Derniere Aldini. 

This constant industry, which had now be- 
come her habit of life, was more of a practical 
necessity than ever. Nohant, as already men- 
tioned, barely repaid the owner the expenses of 
keeping it up. Madame Sand, who desired to 
be liberal besides, to travel occasionally, to 
gratify little artistic fancies as they arose, must 
look to her literary work to furnish the means. 

" Sometimes," she writes from Nohant, in 
October, 1837, to Madame d'Agoult, then in 
Italy, "I am tempted to realize my capital, 



MENTAL DEVELOPMENT. 1 25 

and come and join you ; but out there I should 
do no work, and the galley-slave is chained up. 
If Buloz lets him go for a walk it is on parole, 
and parole is the cannon-ball the convict drags 
on his foot." 

Nor was it for herself only that she worked 
in future, but for her children, the whole re- 
sponsibility of providing for both of whose 
education she was now about definitely to take 
on her own shoulders. The power of inter- 
ference left to M. Dudevant by the recent legal 
decision had been exercised in a manner leading 
to fresh vexatious contention, and continual 
alarm on Madame Sand's part lest the boy 
should be taken by force from her side. These 
skirmishes included the actual abduction of 
Solange from Nohant by M. Dudevant during 
her mother's absence at Fontainebleau ; a foolish 
and purposeless trick, by which nothing was to 
be gained, except annoyance and trouble to* 
Madame Sand, whose right to the control of her 
daughter had never been contested. A final 
settlement entered into between the parties, 
in 1838, placed these matters henceforward on 
a footing of peace, fortunately permanent. By 
this agreement Madame Sand received back 
from M. Dudevant — who had lately succeeded 
to his father's estate — some house property 
that formed part of her patrimony, and paid 



126 GEORGE SAND. 

down to him the sum of .£2,000 ; he ceding to 
her the remnant of his paternal rights ; she 
freeing him from all charges for Maurice's 
education, her authority over which, in future, 
was recognized as complete. 



CHAPTER VI. 

SOLITUDE, SOCIETY AND SOCIALISM. 

The charge of both children now resting 
entirely in her hands, Madame Sand was 
enabled to fulfill her desire of permanently re- 
moving her boy, now fourteen years of age, 
from the college Henri IV. Not only was she 
opposed to the general regime and educational 
system pursued in French public schools of this 
type, she felt persuaded of its special unsuit- 
ability to her son, whose tastes and tempera- 
ment were artistic, like her own, and whose 
classical studies had been repeatedly interrupted 
by illness. His delicate health determined her 
to spend the winter of 1838-9 abroad with her 
family. Having heard the climate and scenery 
of Majorca highly praised, she selected the 
island for their resort ; tempted herself by the 
prospect of a few months absolute quiet, where, 
with neither letters to answer, nor newspapers 
to read, she would enjoy some rare leisure, 
which she proposed to spend in studying history 
and teaching French to her children. 



128 GEORGE SAND. 

Just at this time her friend and ardent 
admirer, Frederic Chopin, was recovering from 
a chest attack, the first presage of the illness 
that caused his early death. The eminent 
pianist and composer had also been recom- 
mended to winter in the South, and greatly 
needed repose and change of air to recruit him 
from the fatigues of the Parisian season. It 
was arranged that the convalescent should make 
one of the expedition to Majorca. He joined 
Madame Sand and her children at Perpignan, 
and they embarked for Barcelona, whence the 
sea-voyage to the island was safely accomplished, 
the party reaching Palma, the capital, in magni- 
ficent November weather, and never suspecting 
how soon they would have cause to repent their 
choice of a retreat. 

But their practical information about the 
island proved lamentably insufficient. With 
the scenery, indeed, they were enraptured. 
"We found," says Madame Sand in her little 
volume, Un Hiver a Majorque, published the 
following year, "a green Switzerland under a 
Calabrian sky, with all the solemnity and still- 
ness of the East." But though a painter's 
Elysium, Majorca was wanting in the com- 
monest comforts of civilized life. Inns were 
non-existent, foreigners viewed and treated with 
suspicion. The party thought themselves for- 



SOLITUDE, SOCIETY, ETC. 1 29 

tunate in securing a villa some miles from Palma, 
furnished, though scantily. " The country, 
nature, trees, sky, sea, and mountains surpass 
all my dreams," she writes in the first days, " it 
is the promised land ; and as we have succeeded 
in housing ourselves pretty well, we are 
delighted." 

The delight was of brief duration. That 
Madame Sand's manuscripts took a month to 
reach the editor of the Revue des Detix Mondes ; 
that the piano ordered from Paris for Chopin 
took two months to get to Majorca, were the 
least among their troubles. A rainy season of 
exceptional severity set in, and the villa quickly 
became uninhabitable. It was not weather- 
proof. Chopin fell alarmingly ill. Good food 
and medical attendance were hardly to be pro- 
cured for him ; and finally, the villa proprietor, 
having heard that his tenant was suffering from 
consumption — an illness believed to be infec- 
tious by the Majorcans — gave the whole party 
notice to quit. The invalid improving some- 
what, though still too weak to attempt the re- 
turn journey to France, Madame Sand trans- 
ported her ambulance, as she styled it, to some 
tolerable quarters she had already discovered 
in the deserted Carthusian monastery of Valde- 
mosa — "a poetical name and a poetical abode," 
she writes ; an admirable landscape, grand and 
5 



130 GEORGE SAND. 

wild, with the sea at both ends of the horizon, 
formidable peaks around us, eagles pursuing 
their prey even down to the orange-trees in our 
garden, a cypress walk winding from the top of 
our mountain to the bottom of the gorge, tor- 
rents overgrown with myrtles, palm-trees below 
our feet, nothing could be more magnificent 
than this spot." 

Parts of the old monastic buildings were di- 
lapidated ; the rest were in good order, being 
frequented as a summer retreat by the inhabit- 
ants of Palma. Now, in December, the Char- 
treuse was entirely abandoned, except by a 
housekeeper, a sacristan and a lone monk, the 
last offshoot of the community — a kind of 
apothecary, whose stock-in-trade was limited to 
guimauve and dog-grass. 

The rooms into which the travellers moved had 
just been vacated by a Spanish family of political 
refugees departing for France. These lodgings 
were at least provided with doors, window-panes, 
and decent furniture ; but the luxury of chim- 
neys was unknown, and a stove, which had to 
be manufactured at an enormous price on pur- 
pose for the party, is described as "a sort of 
iron cauldron, that made our heads ache and 
dried up our throats." Continuous stormy 
weather having suspended steam traffic with 
the mainland, the visitors had no choice but to 



SOLITUDE, SOCIETY, ETC. 131 

remain prisoners some two months more, during 
which the deluge went on with little intermis- 
sion. 

Still, to young and romantic imaginations 
the island and life in the ex-monastery offered 
considerable charm. Madame Sand and her 
children were delighted with the unfamiliar 
vegetation, the palms, aloes, olives, almond 
and orange trees, the Arab architecture, and 
picturesque costumes. Valdemosa itself was 
splendidly situated among the mountains, in a 
stone-walled garden surrounded with cypress 
trees and planted with palms and olives. In 
the morning, Madame Sand gave lessons to the 
children; in the afternoon, -they ran wild out of 
doors whilst she wrote — when the invalid 
musician was well enough to be left. In the 
evenings she and the young people went wan- 
dering by moonlight through the cloisters, 
exploring the monkish cells and chapels. Mau- 
rice had fortunately recovered his health com- 
pletely, but poor Chopin's state, aggravated by 
the damp weather and privations — for the 
difficulties in obtaining a .regular supply of 
provisions were immense — remained through- 
out their stay a constant and terrible cause of 
anxiety and responsibility to Madame Sand. 
From the islanders no sort of help or even 
sympathy was forthcoming, and thievish ser- 



132 GEORGE SAND. 

vants and extortionate traders were not the 
least of the annoyances with which the stran- 
gers had to contend. In a letter to Francois 
Rollinat she gives a graphic account of their 
misfortunes : — 

It has rightly been laid down as a principle that where 
nature is beautiful and generous, men are bad and avari- 
cious. We had all the trouble in the world to procure 
the commonest articles of food, such as the island pro- 
duces in abundance ; thanks to the signal dishonesty, the 
plundering spirit of the peasants, who made us pay for 
everything three times what it was worth, so that we 
were at their mercy under the penalty of dying of hunger. 
We could get no one to serve us, because we were not 
Christians [the travellers passed for being " sold to the 
Devil" because they did not go to Mass], and, besides, 
nobody would attend on a consumptive invalid. How- 
ever, for better for worse, we were established. . . . 
The place was incomparably poetical; we did not see a 
living soul, nothing disturbed our work; after waiting 
two months, and paying three hundred francs extra, 
Chopin had at last received his piano, and delighted the 
vaults of his cell with his melodies. Health and strength 
were visibly returning to Maurice ; as for me, I worked 
as tutor seven hours a day : I sat up working on my own 
account half the night ; Chopin composed master-pieces, 
and we hoped to put up with the remainder of our dis- 
comforts by the aid of these compensations. 

It was in the cells of Valdemosa that Madame 
Sand completed her novel of Monastic life, 
Spiridion, then publishing in the Revue des 



SOLITUDE, SOCIETY, ETC. 1 33 

Deux Monde s. " For heaven's sake not so 
much mysticism ! " prayed the editor of her, 
now and then ; and assuredly those readers for 
whom George Sand was simply a purveyor of 
passionate romances, those critics who set her 
down in their minds as exclusively a glorifier 
of mutinous emotion and the apologist of law- 
less love, must have been taken aback by these 
pages, in which she had devoted her most 
fervent energies to tracing the spiritual his- 
tory, peu recreatif, as she dryly observes, of a 
monk who, in the days of the decadence of the 
monastic orders, retained earnestness and sin- 
cerity ; whose mind, revolted by the hypocrisy 
and worldliness around him, passes through the 
successive stages of heresy and philosophic 
doubt, and to whom is finally revealed an 
eternal gospel, which lies at the core of his 
old religion, but which later growths have 
stifled, and which outlasts all shocks and 
changes, and is to generate the religion of 
the future. 

The compositions of Chopin above alluded to, 
include the finest of his well-known Preludes, 
which may easily be conceived of as suggested 
by the strange mingling of contrasting impres- 
sions in the Chartreuse. " Several of these 
Preludes," writes Madame Sand, " represent 
the visions that haunted him of deceased 



134 GEORGE SAND. 

monks, the sounds of funeral chants ; others 
are soft and melancholy ; these came to him in 
his hours of sunshine and health, at the sound 
of the children's laughter beneath the window, 
the distant thrum of guitars and the songs of 
the birds under the damp foliage ; at the sight 
of the pale little roses in bloom among the 
snow." 

The loneliness and melancholy beauty of the 
spot, however congenial to the romance writer 
or inspiring to the composer, were not the right 
tonics for the nerves of the over-sensitive, 
imaginative invalid. The care and nursing of 
Madame Sand made amends for much, and by 
her good sense she saved him from being 
doctored to death by local practitioners. §ut 
his fortitude, which bore up heroically against 
his personal danger, was not proof against the 
dreary influences of Valdemosa in bad weather, 
the fogs, the sound of the hurricane sweeping 
through the valley, and bringiiflg down portions 
of the dilapidated building, the noise of the 
torrents, the cries of the scared sea-birds and 
the roar of the sea. 

The elevation of the Chartreuse made the 
climate peculiarly disagreeable at this season. 
She writes on : — 

We lived in the midst of clouds, and for fifty days were 
unable to get down into the plains; the roads were 
changed to torrents, and we saw nothing more of the sun. 



SOLITUDE, SOCIETY, ETC. 1 35 

I should have thought it all beautiful if poor Chopin 
'could only have got on. Maurice was none the worse. 
The wind and the sea sung sublimely as they beat against 
the rocks. The vast and empty cloisters cracked over 
our heads. If I had been there when I wrote the portion 
of Lelia that takes place in the convent, I should have 
made it finer and truer. But my poor friend's chest got 
worse and worse. The fine weather did not return. . . 
A maid I had brought over from France, and who so far 
had resigned herself, on condition of enormous wages, to 
cook and do the housework, began to refuse attendance, 
as too hard. The moment was coming when after hav- 
ing wielded the broom and managed the pot au feu, I was 
ready to drop with fatigue — for besides my work as 
tutor, besides my literary labor, besides the continual 
attention necessitated by the condition of my invalid, I 
had rheumatism in every limb. 

The return of spring was hailed as offering a 
tardy release from their island. The steamers 
were running again, and the party determined 
to leave at all risks ; for though Chopin's state 
was more precarious than ever, nothing could 
be worse for* him than to remain. They 
departed, feeling, she admits, as though they 
were escaping from the tender mercies of Poly- 
nesian savages, and once safely on board a 
French vessel at Barcelona, they thankfully 
welcomed the day that restored them to com- 
fort and civilization, and saw the end of an 
expedition that had turned out in most respects 
so disastrous a fiasco. 



136 GEORGE SAND. 

They remained throughout April at Mar- 
seilles, where Chopin, in the hands of a good" 
doctor, became convalescent. From Marseilles 
they made a short tour in Italy, visiting Genoa 
and the neighborhood, and returning to France 
in May, Chopin apparently on the high road to 
complete recovery. It was in the following 
year that his illness returned in a graver form, 
and unmistakable symptoms of consumption 
showed themselves. The life of a fashionable 
pianist in Paris, the constant excitement, late 
hours, and heavy strain of nervous exertion, 
were fatal to his future chances of preserving 
his health ; but it was a life to which he had 
now become wedded, and which he never will- 
ingly left, except for his long annual visits to 
Nohant. 

Madame Sand repeatedly contemplated set- 
tling herself entirely in the country. She had 
no love for Paris. " Parisian life strains our 
nerves and kills us in the long run," she writes 
from Nohant to one of her correspondents. 
" Ah, how I hate it, that centre of light ! I would 
never set foot in it again, if the people I like 
would make the same resolution/' And again, 
speaking of her " Black Valley, so good and so 
stupid," she adds, "Here I am always more my- 
self than at Paris, where I am always ill, in 
body and in spirit." 



SOLITUDE, SOCIETY, ETC. 137 

Paris, however, afforded greater facilities for 
her children's education. She had a strong 
desire to see her son an artist, and he was 
already studying painting in Delacroix's studio. 
Also her income at this moment did not suffice 
to enable her to live continuously at Nohant 
where, she frankly confessed, she had not yet 
found out how to live economically, expected as 
she was to keep open house, regarded as 
grudging and unneighborly if she did not 
maintain her establishment on a scale to which 
her resources as yet were unequal. Her 
expenses in the country she calculated as double 
those in Paris, where, as she writes to M. 
Chatiron, — 

Everyone's independence is admirable. You invite 
whom you like, and when you don't wish to receive 
anyone you let the porter know you are not at home. 
Yet I hate Paris in all other respects. There I grow 
stout, and my mind grows thin. You know how quiet 
and retired my life there is, and I do not understand why 
you tell me, as they say in the provinces, that glory 
keeps me there. I have no glory, I have never sought 
for it, and I don't care a cigarette for it. I want to 
breath fresh air and live in peace. I am succeeding, but 
you see and you know on what conditions. 

Her Paris residence, a few seasons later, she 
fixed in the Courd' Orleans Rue St. Lazare, in a 
block of buildings one-third of which was 



138 GEORGE SAND. 

occupied by herself and her family ; another 
belonged to her friend, Madame Marliani, wife 
of- the Spanish Consul, the third to Frederic 
Chopin. 

With respect to Chopin's long and deep 
attachment to Madame Sand, and its requital, 
concerning which so much has been written, 
there can surely be no greater misstatement 
than to speak of her as having blighted his life. 
This last part of his life was indeed blighted, 
but by ill-health and consequent nervous 
irritability and suffering ; but such mitigation as 
was possible he found for eight years in the 
womanly devotion and genial society of 
Madame Sand — real benefits to one whose 
strange and delicate individuality it was not 
easy to befriend — and which the breach that 
took place between them shortly before his 
death should not allow us to forget. 

"Chopin," observes Eugene Delacroix, "be- 
longs to the small number of those whom one 
can both esteem and love." Madame Sand 
joined a sympathetic appreciation of the refine- 
ment of his nature, and an enthusiastic admira- 
tion of his genius — feelings she shared with 
his numberless female worshippers — to a 
strength of character that lent the support no 
other could perhaps so fully have given, or that 
he would accept from no other, to the fragile, 






SOLITUDE, SOCIETY, ETC. 1 39 

nervous, suffering tone-poet. Her sentiments 
towards him seem to resolve themselves into a 
great tenderness rather than a passionate fer- 
vor — a placid affection for himself, and an 
adoration for his music. 

All the time their existences, so far from 
having been united, flowed in different, nay 
divergent channels. Chopin, the idol of Paris 
society, moved constantly in the aristocratic 
and fashionable world, from which Madame 
Sand lived aloof. She for her part had heavy 
domestic cares and anxieties that did not touch 
him, and with the political party which was ab- 
sorbing more and more of her energies he had 
no sympathy whatever. Whether the cause 
were the false start she had made at the outset 
by her marriage, forbidding her the realization 
of a woman's ideal, the non-separation of the 
gift of her heart from that of her whole life, or 
whether that her masculine strength of intellect 
created for her serious public interests and 
occupations, beside which personal pleasures 
and pains are apt to become of secondary 
moment, certain it appears that with George 
Sand, as with many an eminent artist of the 
opposite sex, such affaires de cceur were but 
ripples on the sea of a large and active exist- 
ence. 

The year after her return from Majorca was 



140 GEORGE SAND. 

marked by her first appearance before the public 
as a dramatic author. Although it was a line 
in which she afterwards obtained successes, as 
will be seen in a future chapter, the result of 
this initial effort, Cosima, a five-act drama, was 
not encouraging. It was acted at the Theatre 
Francais in the spring of 1840, and proved a 
failure. It betrays no insufficient sense of drama- 
tic effect, nor lack of the means for producing 
it, but decided clumsiness in the adaptation of 
these means to that end. The plot and person- 
ages recall those of Indiana, with the impor- 
tant differences that the beau role of the piece 
falls to the husband, and that the scene is 
transported back to Florence in the Middle 
Ages — an undoubted error, as giving to a 
play essentially modern and French in its com- 
plexities of sentiment and motive a strong local 
coloring of a past time and another people, 
making the whole seem unreal. It has a 
psychological subject which Emile Augier or 
Dumas fils would know how to handle drama- 
tically ; but as treated by George Sand, we are 
perpetually being led to anticipate too much in 
the way of action, to have our expectations 
dissipated the next moment. A wet blanket of 
disappointment on this head dampens any other 
satisfaction that the merits of the play might 
otherwise afford. 



SOLITUDE, SOCIETY, ETC. 141 

Hitherto she had continued to write regularly 
for the Revue des Deux Mondes. As her revo- 
lutionary opinions became more pronounced, 
they began to find utterance in her romances. 
Her conversion by Michel had not only been 
complete, but the disciple had outstripped the 
master. The study of the communistic theories 
of Pierre Leroux had familiarized her with the 
speculations in social science of those who at 
this time were devoting their attention to criti- 
cising the existing social organization, and 
seeking, and sometimes imagining they had 
found, the secret of creating a better. George 
Sand's strong admiration for the writings of 
Leroux, always praised by her in the highest 
terms, strikes us now as extravagant, but was 
shared to some extent by not a few leading men 
of the time, such as Sainte-Beuve and Lamartine. 
Her intellect had eagerly followed this bold and 
earnest pioneer in new-discovered worlds of 
thought ; "I do not say it is the last word of 
humanity, but, so far, it is its most advanced 
expression," she states of his philosophy. The 
study of it had brought a clearness into her own 
views, due, probably, much more to the action 
of her own mind upon the novel ideas suggested 
than to the lucidity of a system of social science 
as yet undetermined in some of its main points. 

She writes, when looking back on this period 
from a long distance of time, — 



142 GEORGE SAND. 

After the despairs of my youth, I was governed by too 
many illusions. Morbid scepticism was succeeded in me 
by too much kindliness and ingenuousness. A thousand 
times over I was duped by dreams of an archangelic 
fusion of the opposing forces in the great strife of ideas. 

Her novel Horace ; written for the Revue des 
Deux Mondes, was rejected — as subversive of 
law and order — by the editor, except on condi- 
tion of alterations which she declined to make. 

After this temporary rupture with Buloz, 
Madame Sand's services were largely appropri- 
ated by the Revue Independante, a new j ournal 
founded in 1840 by her friends Pierre Leroux 
and Louis Viardot, in conjunction with whose 
names hers appears on the title page as leading 
contributor. For this periodical no theories 
could be too advanced, no fictitious illustrations 
too audacious, and to its pages accordingly was 
Horace transferred. Among the secondary 
characters in this novel figure a young couple, 
immaculate otherwise in principle and in con- 
duct, but who as converts to St. Simonism have 
dispensed with the ordinary legal sanction to 
their union. Perhaps a more solid objection to 
its insertion in the Revue des Deux Mondes was 
the picture introduced of the emeute of June 
1832, painted in heroic colors. Both these fea- 
tures, however, are purely incidental. The main 
interest and the real strength of the book lie in 



SOLITUDE, SOCIETY, ETC. 1 43 

a remarkable study of character-development — 
that of the chief personage, Horace. It is a 
cleverly painted portrait of a type that reap- 
pears, with slight modifications, in all ages ; a 
moral charlatan, who half imposes on himself, 
and entirely for a while on other people. A 
would-be hero, genius, and chivalrous lover, he 
has none of the genuine qualities needed for 
sustaining the parts. Nonchalant and inert of 
temperament, he is capable of nothing beyond a 
short course of successful affectation. The 
imposition breaking down at last, he sinks help- 
lessly into the unheroic mediocrity of position 
and pretension for which alone he is fit. 

A veritable attempt at a Socialist novel is the 
Compagnon du Tour de France written in the 
course of 1840, which must surely be ranked as 
one of the weakest of George Sand's produc- 
tions. Exactly the converse of Horace may be 
said of this bock. In the former, those most 
repelled by the revolutionary doctrines flashing 
out here and there, will yet be struck and 
interested by the masterly piece of character- 
painting that makes of the novel a success. 
The utmost fanaticism for the ideas ventilated 
in the Compagnon du Tour de France can recon- 
cile no reader to the dullness and unreality of 
the story which make of it a failure. For her 
socialism itself, as set forth in her writings, dis- 



144 GEORGE SAND. 

passionate examination of what she actually 
inculcated, leaves but little warrant, in the state 
of progress now reached, for echoing the mighty 
outcry raised against it at the time. No doubt 
she thought that a complete reorganization of 
society on a new basis was eminently to be 
desired. But what she definitely advocated 
was, first, free education for the poor, and 
secondly, some fairer adjustment of the rela- 
tions to each other of capital and labor. As to 
the first, authority has already sanctioned her 
opinion ; the second question, if unsettled, has 
become a first preoccupation with statesmen 
and philosophers of all denominations in the 
present day. 

With regard to the complete solution of the 
problem, she leaves her socialist heroes, as she 
herself felt, in doubt and perplexity. There 
was something in the schemes and doctrines she 
conscientiously approved, irreconcilable with 
her artist-nature — a materialistic tendency 
which clashed with her poetical instincts. 
When the stern demagogue Michel denounced 
the whole tribe of artists as a corrupting influ- 
ence, enervating to the courage and will of a 
nation, she rose up energetically in defence of 
the confraternity to which she was born : — 

Will you tell me, pray, what you mean, with your 
declamations against artists ? Cry out against them as 



SOLITUDE, SOCIETY, ETC. 145 

much as you please, but respect art. Oh, you Vandal! 
I like that stern sectarian who wants to dress Taglioni in 
a stuff-gown and sabats, and set Liszt's hands to turn the 
machinery of a wine-press, and who yet, as he lies on the 
grass, finds the tears come into his eyes at the least 
linnet's song, and who makes a disturbance in the theatre 
to stop Othello from murdering Malibran ! The austere 
citizen would suppress artists as social excrescences 
that absorb too much of the sap ; but this gentleman is 
fond of vocal music, and so will spare the singers. Let us 
hope that painters will find one among your strong heads 
who appreciates painting, and won't wall up all studio 
windows. And as for the poets, they are your cousins ; 
and you don't despise their forms of language and their 
rhythmical mechanism when you want to make an impres- 
sion on the idle crowd. You will go to them to take 
lessons in metaphor, and how to make use of it. 

Unfortunately for the cause of the superiority of 
antiquity, whenever you go to hear Berlioz's Funeral 
March, the least that can happen to you will be to con- 
fess that this music is rather better than what they used 
to give us in Sparta, when we served under Lycurgus ; 
you will think that Apollo, displeased to see us sacrificing 
to Pallas exclusively, has played us a trick in giving 
lessons to that Babylonian, so that by the exercise of a 
magnetic and disastrous power over us, he may lead our 
spirits astray. 

And she would prove to the demagogue, out 
of his own mouth, that everything cannot be re- 
duced to " bread and shoes all round," as the 
grand desideratum. Give these to men, it will 
not suffice. The eloquent orator instinctively 
seeks besides to impart " hallowed emotions 



146 GEORGE SAND. 

and mystic enthusiasm to those who toil and 
sweat — he teaches them to hope, to dream of 
God, to take courage and lift themselves above 
the sickening miseries of human conditions by 
the thought of a future, chimerical it may be, 
but strengthening and sublime." 

For a period, however, she was too fascinated 
by the new ideas to judge them, and she 
straightway sought in her art a means of popular- 
izing them. "These ideas," she writes in a 
later preface to her socialist novel, Le Peche 
de M. Antoine, "at which, as yet but a small 
number of conservative spirits had taken 
alarm, had, as yet, only really begun to 
sprout in a small number of attentive, labor- 
ious minds. The government, so long as no 
actual form of political application was assumed, 
was not to be disquieted by theories, and let 
every man make his own, put forth his dream, 
and innocently construct his city of the future, 
by his own fireside, in the garden of his im- 
agination." 

She was aware that her readers thought her 
novels getting more and more tedious, in pro- 
portion as she communicated to her fictitious 
heroes and heroines the pre-occupations of her 
brain, and that she was thus stepping out of 
the domain of art. But she affirmed she could 
never help writing of whatever was absorbing 



SOLITUDE, SOCIETY, ETC. Itf 

her thoughts and feelings at the moment, and 
must take her chance of boring the public. 
Fortunately for Le Pe'che' de M. Antoine, nature 
and human nature are here allowed to claim the 
larger share of our attention, and philosophy is 
a secondary feature. The scene is laid in the 
picturesque Marche country on the confines of 
Berry, a day's journey from Nohant, and we 
are glad to linger with her along the rocky 
banks of the Creuse, or among the ruined 
castles of Crozant and Chateaubrun. The novel 
contains much that is original and admirable in 
the drawing of characters of the most opposite 
classes. 

Finally, in Le Meimier cT Angibault* written 
as was the last-mentioned work some four or 
five years later (1844-45), but which may be 
named here, as making up with Le Compagnon 
du Tour de France the trio of "socialist" nov- 
els, the Tendenz does not interfere to the detri- 
ment of the artistic plan of the book. In it 
the romantic elements of the remote country 
nook she inhabited are cleverly brought 
together, without departing too widely from 
probability. The dilapidated castle, the pictur- 
esque mill, the traditions of brigandage two 
generations ago, all these were realities famil- 

* The Miller o£ Angibault. Translated by M. E. Dewey. 
Boston, Boberts Brothers. 



148 GPORGE SAND. 

iar to her notice. The painting of the country 
and country people is masterly ; and there is 
not a passage in the book to offend the taste 
of the most scrupulous reader. Nor can it be 
justly impugned on the ground of inculcating 
disturbing political principles. The personages, 
in their preference of poverty and obscurity to 
rank and wealth, may, in the judgment of some, 
think and conduct themselves like chimerical 
dreamers, but their actions, however quixotic, 
concern themselves alone. 

But, previous to either of the two novels last 
named, she had presented the world with a 
more ambitious work, whose merit was to 
compel universal acknowledgment — the most 
important, in fact, she had produced for eight 
years. 



CHAPTER VII. 

CONSUELO HOME LIFE AT NOHANT. 

Consuelo first appeared in the Revue Inde'pen- 
dante, 1842-43. This noble book might not be 
inaptly described as, 

— a whole which, irregular in parts, 
Yet left a grand impression on the mind. 

Its reckless proportions naturally " shocked the 
connoisseurs " among literary critics, especially 
in her own land ; but nevertheless it became, 
and deservedly, one of her most popular pro- 
ductions, and did more than any other single 
novel she ever wrote to spread her popularity 
abroad. If Indiana, Valentine, and Lelia had 
never been written to create the fame of George 
Sand, Consuelo would have done so, and may be 
said to have established it over again, on a 
better and more lasting basis. Upon so well- 
known a work lengthened comment here would 
be superfluous. Originally intended for a nov- 
elette, — the opening chapters appear in the 
Revue under the modest heading, Consuelo, 



ISO GEORGE SAND. 

conte, — the beginning - was so successful that 
the author was urged to extend her plan 
beyond its first proposed limits. The novel is 
an ephemeral form of art, no doubt, but it is 
difficult to conceive of a stage of social and 
intellectual progress when the first part of 
Consuelo will cease to be read with interest and 
delight. 

The heroine once transported from the 
lagunes of Venice to the frontier of Bohemia 
and the castle of Rudolstadt, the character of 
the story becomes less naturalistic ; the story- 
teller loses herself somewhat in subterranean 
passages and the mazes of adventure generally. 
She wrote on, she acknowledges, at hap-hazard, 
tempted and led away by the new horizons 
which the artistic and historical researches her 
work required kept opening to her view. But 
the powerful contrast between the two pictures, 
— of bright, sunshiny, free, sensuous, careless 
Venetian folk-life, and of the stern gloom of 
the mediaeval castle, where the more spiritual 
consolations of existence come into promi- 
nence — is singularly effective and original. So 
also is the charming way in which an incident in 
the boyhood of young Joseph Haydn is treated 
by her fancy, in the episode of Consuelo's flight 
from the castle, when he becomes her fellow- 
traveller, and their adventures across country 



CONSUEL O — HOME LIFE. 1 5 1 

are told with such zest and entrain, in pages 
where life-sketches of character, such as the 
good-natured, self-indulgent canon, the violent, 
abandoned Corilla, make us forget the wildest 
improbabilities of the fiction itself. The con- 
cluding portion of the book, again entirely 
different in frame, with its delineation of 
art-life in a fashionable capital, Vienna, is as 
true as it is brilliant. It teems with suggestive 
ideas on the subject of musical and dramatic 
art, and with excellently drawn types. The re- 
lations of professional and amateur, the contra- 
dictions and contentions to which, in a woman's 
nature, the rival forces of love and of an artistic 
vocation may give rise, have never been better 
portrayed, in any novel. The heroine, Con- 
suelo, is of course an ideal .character: her 
achievements partake of the marvellous ; and 
there are digressions in the book which are dif- 
fuse in the extreme ; but nowhere is the 
author's imagination more attractively displayed 
and her style more engaging. The tone 
throughout is noble and pure. To look on 
Consuelo as an agreeable story merely is to 
overlook, the elevation of the moral standard of 
the book, in which much of its. power resides. 
It marks more strongly than Mauprat the 
change that had come over the spirit of George 
Sand's compositions. 



152 GEORGE SAND. 

In the continuation, La Comtesse de Rodol- 
stadt, which followed immediately in the Revue 
Independante, 1843, the novelist strays further 
and further from reality — the terra firma on 
which her fancy improvises such charming 
dances. Here she only touches the ground now 
and then, and between whiles her imagination 
asks ours to accompany it on the most extraor- 
dinary flights. As a novel of adventure, it is 
written with unflagging spirit ; and in the rites 
and doctrines of the Illuminati, an idealization 
of the feature of the secret sects of the last 
century, she found a new medium of expression 
for her sentiments regarding the present abuses 
of society and the need of thorough renovation. 
Secret societies, at that time, were extremely 
numerous and active among the Republican 
workers in France. Madame Sand seems 
thoroughly to have appreciated their dangers, 
and has expressly stated that she was no advo- 
cate of such sects ; that though under a tyranny, 
such as that which oppressed Germany in the 
times of which she wrote, they may be a neces- 
sity, elsewhere they are an abuse if not a crime. 
" The custom indeed I have never regarded as 
applicable for good in our time and our country ; 
I have never believed that it can bring forth 
anything in future but a dictatorship, and the 
dictatorial principle is one I have never ac- 
cepted. " {Histoire de ma Vie.) 



CONSUELO — HOME LIFE. 1 53 

But the romance of the subject was irresistibly 
tempting to her inventive faculty. " Tell Leroux 
to send me some more books on freemasonry, 
if he can find any," she writes to a correspon- 
dent at Paris whilst working at the Comtesse de 
Rudolstadt at Nohant ; " I am plunged into it 
over head and ears. Tell him also that he has 
there thrown me into an abyss of follies and 
absurdities, but that I am dabbling about cour- 
ageously though prepared to extract nothing but 
nonsense." 

For the musical miracles which it is given to 
Madame Sand's heroes and heroines to perform 
at a trifling cost, she may well at this time have 
come to regard them as almost in the natural 
order. She had received her second, and her best 
musical education through the contemplation of 
original musical genius, of the rarest quality, 
among her most intimate friends, her constant 
guests at Paris and Nohant. The vocal and 
instrumental feats of Consuelo and Count Albert 
themselves are not more astonishing than the 
actual recorded achievements of Liszt, pro- 
nounced a perfect virtuoso at twelve years old — 
and no wonder ! The boy had so carried away 
his accompanyists, the band of the Italian opera 
at Paris, by his performance of the solo in an 
orchestral piece, that when the moment came 
for them to strike in, one and all forgot to do 



154 GEORGE SAND. 

so, but remained silent, petrified with amaze- 
ment. And Liszt when in the full development 
of his genius, had, as we have seen, been the art- 
comrade of George Sand ; he had spent the 
whole of the summer season of 1837 at Nohant, 
transcribing Beethoven's symphonies for the 
piano-forte whilst she wrote her romances ; she 
was familiar with his marvellous improvisations. 
In her "Trip to Chamounix" (Lettres cCun Voy- 
ageur, No. VI.) she has drawn a vivid picture 
of their extraordinary effect, describing his un- 
rehearsed organ recital in the Cathedral of 
Freibourg to his little party of travelling com- 
panions. Nor was the charm of Chopin's gift 
less magical. The well-known anecdotes related 
on this subject are like so many glimpses into 
a musical paradise. Madame Sand has given 
us an amusing one herself. It is evening in 
her salon at Paris. At the piano is Chopin; 
and she, , her son, Eugene Delacroix, and the 
Polish poet Mickiewicz sit listening whilst the 
composer, in an inspired mood, is extemporizing 
in the sublimest manner to the little circle. All 
are in silent raptures ; when the servant breaks 
in with the alarm — the house is on fire. They 
rush to the room where the flames are, and 
succeed after a time in extinguishing them. 
Then they perceive that the poet Mickiewicz is 
missing. On returning to the salon they find 



CONSUELO—HOME LIFE. 155 

him as they left him, rapt, entranced, uncon- 
scious of the stir around him, of the scare that 
had driven all the rest from the room. " He 
did not even know we had gone and left him 
alone. He was listening to Chopin, he had 
continued to hear him." Nor could the be- 
witched poet be brought down from the clouds 
that evening. He remained deaf to their ban- 
ter, to Madame Sand's laughing admonition, 
" Next time I am with you when the house takes 
fire, I must begin by putting you into a safe 
place, for I see you would get burnt like a mere 
faggot, before you knew what was going on." 

Eugene Delacroix, one of Madame Sand's 
earliest and most valued friends in the artist- 
world, and one of the many with whom she en- 
joyed along and unclouded friendship, gives in 
his letters some agreeable pictures of life at 
Nohant, during his visits there in the successive 
summers of 1 845 and 1 846 : — 

When not assembled together with the rest for dinner, 
breakfast, a game of billiards, or a walk, you are in your 
room reading, or lounging on your sofa. Every moment 
there come in through the window open on the garden, 
"puffs of music" from Chopin, working away on one side, 
which mingle with the song of nightingales and the scent 
of the roses. 

He describes a quiet, monastic-like existence, 
simple and studious: "We have not even the 



156 GEORGE SAND. 

distraction of neighbors and friends around. 
In this country everybody stays at home, to 
look after his oxen and his land. One would 
become a fossil in a very short time." 

The greatest event for the visitor was a 
village-festival — a wedding or a Saint's day — 
when the rustic dances went on under the tall 
elms to the roaring of the bagpipes. Peasant 
youths and peasant maids joined hands in the 
bourree, the characteristic dance of the country ; 
now, we fear, surviving in tradition 6*nly, but 
then still popular. The great artist was fired to 
paint a "Ste. Anne," patron-saint of Nohant, in 
honor of the place, but his work progressed but 
slowly. He writes in August, 1846: — "I am 
frightfully lazy, I can do nothing, I hardly read; 
and yet the days pass too quickly, for I must 
soon renounce this vie de chanoine, and return 
into the furnace of stirring ideas, good and 
bad. In Berry they have very few ideas, but 
they do just as well without." Then he adds, 
" Chopin has been playing Beethoven to me 
divinely well. That is worth all sestheticism." 

Little theatrical entertainments of an origi- 
nal kind, presided over by Madame Sand, and 
carried out by herself, her children, and their 
young friends, became in time a prominent 
feature of life at Nohant. She thus describes 
their nature and commencements: — 



CONSUELO — HOME LIFE. 1 57 

During the long evenings I took it into my head to 
devise for my family theatricals on the old Italian 
pattern — co77imedia delf arte — plays in which the dia- 
logue, itself extemporized, yet follows the outlines of a 
written plan, placarded behind the scenes. It is some- 
thing like the charades acted in society, the development 
of which depends on the talent contributed by the actors. 
It was with these that we began, but little by little the 
word of the charade disappeared. We acted wild 
saynetes, afterwards comedies of plot and intrigue, finally 
dramas of event and emotion. 

All began with pantomime ; and this was Chopin's 
invention. He sat at the piano and extemporized, whilst 
the youug people acted scenes in dumb show* and danced 
comic ballets. These charming improvisations turned 
the children's heads and made their legs nimble. He 
led them just as he chose, making them pass, according 
to his fancy, from the amusing to the severe, from bur- 
lesque to solemnity — now graceful, now impassioned. 
We invented all kinds of costumes, so as to play differ- 
ent characters in succession. No sooner did the artist 
see them appear than he adapted his theme and rhythm 
to the parts wonderfully. This would be repeated for 
two or three evenings; after which the maestro, depart- 
ing for Paris, would leave us quite excited, exalted, 
determined not to let the spark be lost with which he 
had electrified us. 

* Chopin was possessed of much dramatic 
talent himself, and was an admirable mimic. 
When a boy it had been said of him that he 
was born to be a great actor. His capacity for 
facial expressions was something extraordinary; 



158 GEORGE SAND. 

he often amused his friends by imitations of 
fellow-musicians, reproducing their manner and 
gestures to the life ; so well as actually on more 
than one occasion to take in the spectator. 

Madame Sand thus gives account of the even 
tenor of her way, in a letter of September, 
1845: — 

I have been in Paris till June, and since then am a . 
Nohant until the winter, as usual; for henceforward my 
life is ruled as regularly as music paper. I have written 
two or three novels, one of which is just going to appear. 

My son is still thin and delicate, but otherwise well. 
He is the best being, the gentlest, most equable, indus- 
trious, simple-minded, and straightforward ever seen. 
Our characters, like our hearts, agree so well that we can 
hardly live a day apart. He is entering his twenty-third 
year, Solange her eighteenth. We have our ways of 
merriment, not noisy, but sustained, which bring our ages 
nearer together, and when we have been working hard all 
the week we allow ourselves, by way of a grand holiday, 
to go and eat our cake out of doors some way off, in a 
wood or an olcl ruin, with my brother, who is like a sturdy 
peasant, full of fun and good nature, and who dines with 
us every day, seeing that he lives not two miles off. 
Such are our grand pranks. 

Sometimes these little outings would origi- 
nate a novel, as with the Meunier d'Angibault, 
which she ascribes to " a walk, a discovery, a 
day of leisure, an hour of idleness." On a 
ramble with her children she came upon what 



CONSUELO — HOME LIFE. 1 59 

she calls "a nook in a wild paradise ;" a mill, 
whose owner had allowed everything to grow 
around the sluices that chose to spring up, briar 
and alder, oaks and rushes. The stream, left to 
follow its devices, had forced its way through 
the sand and the grass in a network of little 
waterfalls, covered below in the summer time 
with thick tufts of aquatic plants. 

It was enough ; the seed was sown and the 
fruit resulted. "The apple falling from the 
tree led Newton to the discovery of one of the 
grand laws of the universe. ... In scien- 
tific works of genius, reflection derives the 
causes of things from a single fact. In art's 
humbler fancies, that isolated fact is dressed 
and completed in a dream." 

The picture given by Madame Sand and her 
guests of these years of her life is charming 
enough, and in certain ways seems an ideal kind 
of existence, amid beloved children, friends, 
pleasant and calm surroundings, and the sweets 
of successful literary activity. But if it had its 
bright lights, it had also its deep shadows. 
For every fresh pleasure and interest crowded 
into her existence, there entered a fresh source 
of anxiety and trouble. Age, in bringing her 
more power of endurance, had not blunted her 
sensibilities. As usual with the strongest na- 
tures in their hours of depression — and none so 



160 GEORGE SAXD. 

strong as to escape these — she could then look 
for no help except from herself. Those ac- 
customed, like her, to shirk no responsibility, 
no burden, to invite others to lean on them, 
and to ask no support, if their fortitude gives 
way find the allowance, help and sympathy so 
easily accorded to their weaker fellow-creatures 
nowhere ready for them. The exclamation 
wrung from one of the characters in a later 
work of Madame Sand's, may be but a faithful 
echo of the cry of her own nature in some 
moment of mental torment. " Let me be 
weak ; I have been seeming to be strong for so 
long a time ! " 

Chopin, though the study of his genius had 
freshly inspired her own, and greatly extended 
her comprehension of musical art, was a being 
to whom the burden of his own life was too 
painful to allow him to lighten the troubles of 
another ; a partial invalid, a prey to nervous 
irritation, he was dependent on her to soothe 
and cheer him at the best of times, and to be 
nurse and secretary besides when he was pros- 
trated by illness or despondency. One is loth 
to call selfish a nature so attractive in its 
refinement, so unhappy in its over-suscepti- 
bility. But it is obvious that such a one might 
easily become a trial to those he loved. With 
all its vigor her nervous system could not 



CONSUELO — HOME LIFE. l6l 

escape the exhaustion and disturbance that 
attend on incessant brain-work. " Those who 
have nothing to do," she remarks, "when they 
see artists produce with facility, are ready to 
wonder at how few hours, how few instants, 
these can reserve for themselves. For such do 
not know how these gymnastics of the imagina- 
tion, if they do not affect your health, yet leave 
an excitation of your nerves, an obsession of 
mental pictures, a languor of spirit, that forbid 
you to carry on any other kind of work." 

Although her constitution was even stronger 
than in her youth, she had for some years been 
subject to severe attacks of neuralgia. "Ma- 
dame Sand suffers terribly from violent head- 
aches and pain in her eyes," remarks Delacroix, 
in one of the letters above quoted, " which she 
takes upon herself to surmount as far as possi- 
ble, with a great effort, so as not to distress us 
by what she goes through." Her habit of writ- 
ing principally at night and contenting herself 
with the least possible allowance of repose, few 
could have persisted in for so long without 
breaking down. For many years she "never 
took more than four hours sleep. The strain 
began to tell on her eye-sight at last, and 
already in a letter of 1842 she speaks of being 
temporarily compelled to suspend this practice 
of night-work, to her great regret, as in the day- 
6 



1 62 GEORGE SAND. 

light hours she was never secure from interrup- 
tion. Only her abnormal power of activity and 
of bearing fatigue could have enabled her to 
fulfill so strenuously the responsibilities she had 
undertaken to her children, her private friends, 
and the public. The pressure of literary work 
was incessant, and whatever her dislike to 
accounts and arithmetic she is said to have ful- 
filled her engagements to editors and publishers 
with the regularity and punctuality of a notary. 
Her large acquaintance, relations with various 
classes, various projects, literary, political, and 
philanthropical, involved an immense amount of 
serious correspondence in addition to that aris- 
ing from the postal persecution from which no 
celebrity escapes. Ladies wrote to consult her 
on sentimental subjects — to inquire of her, as 
of an oracle, whether they should bestow their 
heart, their hand, or both, upon their suitors ; 
poets, to solicit her patronage and criticism. In 
the course of a single half-year, 153 manuscripts 
were sent her for perusal ! She replied when it 
seemed fit, conscientiously and ungrudgingly ; 
but experience had made her less expansive 
than formerly to those whose overtures she 
felt to be prompted by curiosity or some such 
idle motive, in the absence of any sympathy for 
her ways of thinking. " I am not to be caught 
in my words with indifferent persons," she 



CONSUELO— HOME LIFE. 1 63 

writes to M. Charles Duvernet, describing how, 
when in her friend Madame Marliani's salon in 
Paris she heard herself and her political allies 
or their opinions attacked, she was not to be 
provoked into argument or indignant denial, but 
went on quietly with her work of hemming 
pocket-handkerchiefs. "To such people one 
speaks through the medium of the Press. If 
they will not attend, no matter." 

Her sex, her anomalous position, her freedom 
of expression and action, exposed her to an 
extent quite exceptional, even for a public char- 
acter, to the shafts of malice and slander. 
Accustomed to have to brave the worst from 
such attacks, she might and did arrive at treat- 
ing them with an indifference that was not, 
however, in her nature, which shrank from the 
observation and personal criticism of the vulgar. 

To a young poet of promise in whose welfare 
she took interest, she writes, August, 1842: — 

Never show my letters except to your mother, your 
wife, or your greatest friend. It is a shy habit, a mania I 
have to the last degree. The idea that I am not writing 
for those alone to whom I write, or for those who love 
them thoroughly, would freeze my heart and my hand 
directly. Everyone has a fault. Mine is a misanthropy 
in my outward habits — for all that I have no passion 
left in me but the love of my fellow-creatures ; but with 
the small services that my heart and my faith can render 
in this world, my personality has nothing to do. Some 



1 64 GEORGE SAND. 

people have grieved me very much, unconsciously, by 
talking and writing about me personally and my doings, 
even though favorably, and meaning well. Respect this 
malady of spirit. 

Madame Sand, being naturally undemonstra- 
tive, was commonly more or less tongue-tied 
and chilled in the presence of a stranger, and 
she had a frank dread of introductions and first 
interviews, even when the acquaintance was 
one she desired to make. Sometimes she asks 
her friends to prepare such new comers for 
receiving an unfavorable first impression, and to 
beg them not to be unduly prejudiced thereby. 
Such a one would find the persecution of lion- 
hunters intolerable, . and now and then this 
drove her to extremities. Great must, indeed, 
have been the wrath of one of these irrepressi- 
bles, who, more obstinate than the rest, failing 
by fair means to get an introduction to George 
Sand, calmly pushed his way into Nohant 
unauthorized by anyone, whereupon her friends 
conspired to serve him the trick it must be 
owned he deserved ; and which we give in the 
words of Madame Sand, writing to the Comtesse 
d'Agoult. The story is told also by Liszt in 
his letters : — 

M. X. is ushered into my room. A respectable-looking 
person there receives him. She was about forty years of 
age, but you might give her sixty at a pinch. She had 



CONSUELO — HOME LIFE. 165 

had beautiful teeth, but had got none left. All passes 
away ! She had been rather good-looking, but was so no 
longer. All changes ! Her figure was corpulent, and 
her hands were soiled.. Nothing is perfect ! 

She was clad in a gray woolen gown spotted with 
black, and lined with scarlet. A silk handkerchief was 
negligently twisted round her black hair. Her shoes 
were faulty, but she was thoroughly dignified. Now and 
then she seemed on the point of putting an s or a / in the 
wrong place, but she corrected herself gracefully, talked 
of her literary works, of her excellent friend M. Rollinat, 
of the talents of her visitor which had not failed to reach 
her ears, though she lived in complete retirement, over- 
whelmed with work. M. G. brought her a foot-stool, the 
children called her mamma, the servants Madame. 

She had a gracious smile, and much more distinguished 
manners than that fellow George Sand. In a word X. 
was happy and proud of his visit. Perched in a big 
chair, with beaming aspect, arm extended, speech abun- 
dant, there he stayed for a full quarter of an hour in 
ecstasies, and then took leave, bowing down to the 
ground to — Sophie ! 

It was the maid that had thus been success- 
fully passed off as the mistress, who with her 
whole household enjoyed a long and hearty 
laugh at the expense of the departed unbidden 
guest. " M. X. has gone off to Chateauroux," 
she concludes, " on purpose to give an account 
of his interview with me, and to describe me 
personally in all the cafes'' 

This anecdote however belongs to a much 
earlier period of her life, the year 1837. Of her 



1 66 GEORGE SAND. 

cordiality and kindliness to those who ap- 
proached her in a right spirit of sincerity and 
simplicity, many have spoken. For English 
readers we cannot do better than quote Mr. 
Matthew Arnold's interesting account, given in 
the Fortnightly, 1 877, of his visit to her in August, 
1846. Desirous of seeing the green lanes of 
Berry, the rocky heaths of Bourbonnais, the 
descriptions of which in Valentine and Jeanne 
•had charmed him so strongly, the traveller 
chose a route that brought him to within a few 
miles of her home : — "I addressed to Madame 
Sand," he tells us, " the sort of letter of which 
she must in her lifetime have had scores — a 
letter conveying to her, in bad French, the 
youthful and enthusiastic homage of a foreigner 
who had read her works with delight." She 
responded by inviting him to call at Nohant. 
He came and joined a breakfast-party that 
included Madame Sand and her son and 
daughter, Chopin, and other friends — Mr. 
Arnold being placed next to the hostess. He 
says of her : — 

As she spoke, her eyes, head, bearing were all of them 
striking, but the main impression she made was one of 
simplicity, frank, cordial simplicity. After breakfast she 
led the way into the garden, asked me a few kind ques- 
tions about myself and my plans, gathered a flower or 
two and gave them to me, shook hands heartily at the 
gate, and I saw her no more. 



CONSUELO — HOME LIFE 1 67 

During the eight years of successful literary 
activity, lying between Madame Sand's return 
from Majorca and the Revolution of February, 
1848, the profits of her work had, after the 
first, enabled her freely to spend the greater 
part of the year at Nohant, and to provide a 
substantial dowry for her daughter. But the 
amassing of wealth suited neither her taste nor 
her principles. She writes to her poet-portege 
M. Poncy, in September, 1845 : — 

We are in easy circumstances, which enables us to do 
away with poverty in our own neighborhood, and if we 
feel the sorrow of being unable to do away with that 
which desolates the world — a deep sorrow, especially at 
my age, when life has no intoxicating personality left, 
and one sees plainly the spectacle of society in its in- 
justices and frightful disorder — at least we know 
nothing of ennui, of restless ambition and selfish pas- 
sions. We have a sort of relative happiness, and my 
children enjoy it with the simplicity of their age. 

As for me, I only accept it in trembling, for all happiness 
is like a theft in this ill-regulated world of men, where 
you cannot enjoy your ease or your liberty, except to the 
detriment of your fellow-creatures — by the force of 
things, the law of inequality, that odious law, those 
odious combinations, the thought of which poisons my 
sweetest domestic joys and revolts me against myself at 
every moment. I can only find consolation in vowing to 
go on writing as long as I have a breath of life left in me, 
against the infamous maxim, " Chacun chez soz, chacun 
pour soi." Since all I can do is to make this protest, 
make it I shall, in every key. 



1 68 GEORGE SAND. 

Her republican friends in Berry had founded 
in 1844 a local journal for the spread of liberal 
ideas — such as Lamartine at the time was 
supporting at Macon. Madame Sand readily 
contributed her services to a cause where she 
labored for the enlightenment of the masses on 
all subjects — truth, justice, religion, liberty, 
fraternity, duties, and rights. The govern- 
ment of Louis Philippe, so long as such utter- 
ances attacked no definite institution, allowed 
an almost illimitable freedom in expression of 
opinion. The result was that thought had ad- 
vanced so far ahead of action that social philoso- 
phers had grown to argue as though practical 
obstacles had no existence — to be rudely 
reminded of their consequence, when brought 
to the front in 1848, and acting somewhat 
too much as if on that supposition. 

It is impossible not to make concerning 
Madame Sand, the reflection made on other 
foremost workers in the same cause of organic 
social reform — namely, that her character and 
her instincts were in curious opposition to her 
ideas. What was said by Madame d'Agoult of 
Louis Blanc applies with even greater force to 
George Sand : " The sentiment of personality 
was never stronger than in this opposer of 
individualism, communist theories had for their 
champion one most unfit to be absorbed into 



CONSUELO — HOME LIFE. 169 

the community." For no length of time was 
the idea of "communism" accepted, and never 
was ^t advocated by her except in the most 
restricted sense. The land-hunger, or rather 
land-greed, of the small proprietors in her 
neighborhood had, it is true, given her a cer- 
tain disgust for these contested possessions. 
But from the preference of a small child for a 
garden of its own however small, to another's 
however large, she characteristically infers the 
instinct of property as a law of nature it were 
preposterous to disallow, and furthermore she 
lays down as an axiom that, "in treating the 
communistic idea it is necessary first to dis- 
tinguish what is essential in liberty and work to 
the complete existence of the individual, from 
what is collective." When forced by actual 
experience to point out what she holds to be 
the rightful application of the idea, she limits it 
to voluntary association ; and she hoped great 
things from the co-operative principle, as tend- 
ing to eliminate the ills of extreme inequalities 
in the social structure, and to preserve every- 
thing in it that is worth preserving. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

NOVELIST AND POLITICIAN. 

By her novels classed as " socialistic," Madame 
Sand had, as we have seen, incurred the public 
hostility of those whom her doctrines alarmed. 
And yet her " communist" heroes and heroines 
are the most pacific and inoffensive of social 
influences. They merely aspire to isolate them- 
selves, and personally to practice principles and 
virtues of the highest order; unworldliness 
such as, if general, might indeed turn the earth 
into the desired Utopia. Nothing can be said 
against their example, unless that it is too good, 
and that there is little hope of its being widely 
followed. 

Charges of another sort, no less bitter, and 
though exaggerated, somewhat better founded, 
assailed her after the appearance in 1847 of 
Lucrezia Floriani, a novel of character-analysis 
entirely, but into which she was accused of 
having introduced an unflattering portrait of 
Frederic Chopin, whose long and long-requited 
attachment to her entitled him to better treat, 
ment at her hands. 



NOVELIST AND POLITICIAN. 171 

With respect to the general question of such 
alleged fictitious reproductions, few . novelists 
escape getting into trouble on this head. It 
has been aptly observed by Mr. Hamerton that 
the usual procedure of the reading public in 
such cases is to fix on some real personage as 
distinctly unlike the character in the book as 
possible, for the original, and then to complain 
of the unfaithfulness of the resemblance. Mad- 
ame Sand's taste and higher art-instincts 
would have revolted against the practice — 
now unfortunately no longer confined to inferior 
writers — of forcing attention to a novel by 
making it the gibbet of well-known personalities, 
with little or no disguise ; and Chopin himself, 
morbidly sensitive and fanciful though he was, 
read her work without perceiving in it any inten- 
tion there to portray their relations to each 
other, which, indeed, had differed essentially 
from those of the personages in the romance. 

Lucrezia Floriani is a cantatrice of genius, 
who, whilst still young, has retired from the 
world, indifferent to fame, and effectually disen- 
chanted — so she believes — with passion. 
Despite an experience strange and stormy, even 
for a member of her Bohemian profession, 
Lucrezia has miraculously preserved intact her 
native nobility of soul, and appears as a meet 
object of worship to a fastidious young prince 



172 GEORGE SAND. 

on his travels, who becomes passionately enam- 
ored of her. He over-persuades Lucrezia into 
trusting that they will find their felicity in each 
other. Their happiness is of the briefest dura- 
tion, owing to the unreasonable character of the 
prince, who leads the actress a miserable life ; 
his love taking the form of petty tyranny and 
retrospective jealousy. After long years of this 
material and moral captivity, the heroic Lucre- 
zia fades and dies. 

Not content with identifying the intolerable, 
though it must be owned severely-tested, Prince 
Karol with Chopin, imaginative writers have 
gone so far as to assert that the book was con- 
ceived and written from an express design on 
the novelist's part to bring about the breach of 
a link she was beginning to find irksome ! 

Madame Sand has described how it was 
written — as are all such works of imagina- 
tion — in response to a sort of "call" — some 
striking yet indefinable quality in one idea 
among the host always floating through the 
brain of the artist, that makes him instantly 
seize it and single it out as inviting to art-treat- 
ment. It would be preposterous to doubt her 
statement. But whether the inspiration ought 
not to have been sacrificed is another question. 
Her gift was her good angel and her evil angel 
as well, but in any case something of her- despot.- 



NOVELIST AND. POLITICIAN 1 73 

Here, assuredly, it ruled her ill. It is indispu- 
table that, as she had pointed out, the sad his- 
tory of the attachment of Lucrezia the actress 
and Karol the prince deviates too widely from 
that which was supposed to have originated it 
for just comparisons to be ''drawn between the 
two, that Karol is not a genius, and therefore 
has none of the rights of genius — including, 
we presume, the right to be a torment to those 
around him — that to talk of a portrait of Chopin 
without his genius is a contradiction in terms, 
that he never suspected the likeness assumed 
until it was insinuated to him, and so forth. 
But there remains this, that in the work of imag- 
ination she here presented to the public there 
was enough of reality interwoven to make the 
world hasten to identify or confound Prince Karol 
with Chopin. This might have been a foregone 
conclusion, as also that Chopin, the most sensi- 
tive of mortals, would be infinitely pained by 
the inferences that would be drawn. Perhaps if 
only as a genius, he had the right to be spared 
such an infliction ; and one must wish it could 
have appeared in this light to Madame Sand. 
It seems as though it were impossible for the 
-author to put himself at the point of view of the ' 
reader in such matters. The divine spark itself, 
that quickens certain faculties, deadens others. 
When Goethe, in Werther, dragged the private 



174 GEORGE SAND. 

life of his intimate friends, the Kestners, into 
publicity, and by falsifying the character of the 
one and misrepresenting the conduct of the 
other, in obedience to the requisitions of art, 
exposed his beloved Charlotte and her husband 
to all manner of annoyances, it never seems to 
have entered into his head beforehand but that 
they would be delighted by what he had done. 
Nor could he get over his surprise that such 
petty vexations on their part should not be 
merged in a proud satisfaction at the literary 
memorial thus raised by him to their friendly 
intercourse ! This seems incredible, and yet 
his sincerity leaves no room for doubt. 

Madame Sand's transgressions on this head, 
though few, have obtained great notoriety, on 
account of the extraordinary celebrity of two of 
the personages that suggested characters she 
has drawn. To the supposed originals, however 
obscure, the mortification is the same. But 
what often passes uncommented on when the 
individuals said to be traduced are unknown to 
fame, sets the whole world talking when one of 
the first musicians or poets of the century is 
involved ; so that Madame Sand has incurred 
more censure than other novelists, though she 
has deserved it more rarely. But regret re- 
mains that for the sake of Lucre zia Floriani, 
one of the least pleasant though by no means 



NOVELIST AND POLITICIAN 1 75 

the least powerful of her novels, she should 
have exposed herself to the charge of unkind- 
ness to one who had but a short while to live. 

Other causes had latterly been combining to 
lead to differences of which it would certainly 
be unfair to lay the whole blame on Madame 
Sand. The tie of personal attachment between 
Chopin and herself was not associated by iden- 
tity of outward interests or even of cares and 
family affections, such as, in the case of hus- 
band and wife, make self-sacrifice possible under 
conditions which might otherwise be felt un- 
bearable, and help to tide over crises of impa- 
tience or wrong. Madame Sand's children were 
now grown up ; cross-influences could not but 
arise, hard to conciliate. Without accrediting 
Chopin with the self -absorption of Prince Karol, 
it is easy to see here, in a situation somewhat 
anomalous, elements of probable discord. It 
was impossible that he should any longer be a 
first consideration ; impossible that he should 
not resent it. 

For some years his state of health had been 
getting worse and worse, and his nervous sus- 
ceptibilities correspondingly intensified. Mad- 
ame Sand betrayed some impatience at last of 
what she had long borne uncomplainingly, and 
their good understanding was broken. As 
was natural, the breach was the more severely 



176 GEORGE SAND. 

felt by Chopin, but that it was of an irreparable 
nature, one is at liberty to doubt. He bitterly 
regretted what he had lost, for which not all the 
attentions showered on him by his well-wishers 
could afford compensation, as his letters attest. 

But outward circumstances prolonged the 
estrangement till it was too late. They met 
but once after the quarrel, and that was in 
company in March, 1848. Madame Sand would 
at once have made some approach, but Cho- 
pin did not then respond to the appeal ; and 
the reconciliation both perhaps desired was 
never to take place. Political events had inter- 
vened to widen the gap between their paths. 
Chopin had neither part nor lot in the revolu- 
tionary movement that just then was throwing 
all minds and lives into a ferment, and which 
was completely to engross Madame Sand's 
energies for many months to come. It drove 
him away to England, and he only returned to 
Paris, in 1849, to die. 

In May, 1847, the tranquility of life at Nohant 
had been varied by a family event, the marriage 
of Madame Sand's daughter Solange with the 
sculptor Clesinger. The remainder of the 
twelvemonth was spent in the country, appar- 
ently with* very little anticipation on Madame 
Sand's part that the breaking of the political 
storm, that was to draw her into its midst, was 
so near. 



NOVELIST AND POLITICIAN 1 77 

The new year was to be one of serious agita- 
tions, different to any that had yet entered into 
her experience. Political enterprise for the 
time cast all purely personal interests and emo- 
tions into the background. " I have never 
known how to do anything by halves," she says 
of herself very truly ; and whatever may be 
thought of the tendency of her political influ- 
ence and the manner of its exertion, no one can 
tax her with sparing herself in a contest to 
which, moreover, she came disinterested ; vanity 
and ambition having, in one of her sex, nothing 
to gain by it. But in political matters it seems 
hard for a poet to do right. If, like Goethe, he 
holds aloof in great crises, he is branded for it 
as a traitor and a bad patriot. The battle of 
Leipzig is being fought, and he sits tranquilly 
writing the epilogue for a play. If, like George 
Sand, he throws the whole weight of his enthu- 
siastic eloquence into what he believes to be 
the right scale, it is ten to one that his power, 
which knows nothing of caution and patience, 
may do harm to the cause he has at heart. 

Madame Sand rested her hopes for a better 
state of things, for the redemption of France 
from political corruption, for the amelioration 
of the condition of the working classes, and 
reform of social institutions in general, on the 
advent to power of those placed at the head of 



178 GEORGE SAND. 

affairs by the collapse of the government of 
Louis Philippe, a crisis long threatened, long 
prepared, and become inevitable. 

"The whole system," wrote Heine prophetic- 
ally of the existing monarchy, five years before 
its fall, "is not worth a charge of powder, if 
indeed some day a charge of powder does not 
blow it up." February, 1848, saw the explosion, 
the flight of the Royal Family, and the forma- 
tion of a Provisional Government, with Lamar- 
tine at its head. 

It is hard to realize in the present day, when 
we contemplate these events through the sober- 
ing light of the deplorable sequel, how immense 
and wide-spreading was the enthusiasm that at 
this particular juncture seemed to put the fer- 
vent soul of a George Sand or an Armand 
Barbes into the most lukewarm and timid. 
" More than one," writes Madame d'Agoult, 
"who for the last twenty years had been scoffing 
at every grand thought, let himself be won by 
the general emotion." The prevailing impres- 
sion can have fallen little short of the convic- 
tion that a sort of millennium was at hand for 
mankind in general and the French in particu- 
lar, and that all human ills would disappear 
because a bad government had been got rid of, 
and that without such scenes of blood and strife 
as had disfigured previous revolutions. 



NOVELIST AND POLITICIAN 1 79 

The first task was firmly to establish a better 
one in its place. Madame Sand, though with 
a strong perception of the terrible difficulties 
besetting a ministry which, to quote her own 
words, would need, in order to acquit itself suc- 
cessfully, "the genius of a Napoleon and the 
heart of Christ," never relaxed an instant in the 
enforcement, both by example and exhortation, 
of her conviction that it was the duty of all true 
patriots and philanthropists to consecrate their 
energies to the cause of the new republic. 

"My heart is full and my head on fire," she 
writes to a fellow-worker in the same cause. 
" All my physical ailments, all my personal sor- 
rows are forgotten. I live, I am strong, active, 
I am not more than twenty years old." The 
exceptional situation of the country was one in 
which, according to her opinion, it behooved men 
to be ready not only with loyalty and devotion, 
but with fanaticism if needed. She worked 
hard witfi her son and her local allies at the 
ungrateful task of revolutionizing Le Berry, 
which, she sighs, "is very drowsy." In March 
she came up to Paris and placed her services as 
journalist and partizan generally at the disposal 
of Ledru-Rollin, Minister of the Interior under 
the new Government. " Here am I already 
doing the work of a statesman," she writes from 
Paris to her son at Nohant, March 24. Her 



180 GEORGE SAND. 

indefatigable energy, enabling her as it did to 
disdain repose, was perhaps the object of envy- 
to the statesmen themselves. At their disgust 
when kept up all night by the official duties of 
their posts, she laughs without mercy. Night 
and day her pen was occupied, now drawing up 
circulars for the administration, now lecturing 
the people in political pamphlets addressed to 
them. To the Bulletin de la Republique, a 
government journal started with the laudable 
purpose of preserving a clear understanding 
between the mass of the people in the provinces 
and the central government, she became a lead- 
ing contributor. For the festal invitation per- 
formances given to the people at the " Theatre 
de la Republique," where Rachel sang the Mar- 
seillaise and acted in Les Horaces, Madame Sand 
wrote a little "occasional" prologue, Le Rot At* 
tend, a new and democratic version of Moliere's 
Impromptu de Versailles. The outline is as fol- 
lows : — Moliere is discovered impatient and 
uneasy ; the King waits, and the comedians 
are not ready. He sinks asleep, and has a 
vision, in which the muse emerges out of a 
cloud, escorted by ^Eschylus, Sophocles, Eurip- 
ides, Shakespeare, and Beaumarchais, to each 
of whom are assigned a few lines — where pos- 
sible, lines of their own — in praise of equality 
and fraternity. They vanish, and Moliere 



NOVELIST AND POLITICIAN. l8l 

awakes ; his servant announces to him that the 
King waits — but the King this time is, of 
course, the people, to whom Moliere now 
addresses his flattering speech in turn. 

But the fervor of heroism that fired every- 
body in the first days of successful revolution, 
that made the leaders disinterested, the masses 
well-behaved, reasonable, and manageable, was 
for the maj ority a flash only ; and the dreamed-of 
social ideal, touched for a moment was to 
recede again into the far distance. It was 
Madame Sand's error, and no ignoble one, to 
entertain the belief that a nation could safely be 
trusted to the guidance of a force so variable 
and uncontrollable as enthusiasm, and that the 
principle of self-devotion could be relied upon 
as a motive power. ■ The divisions, intrigues, 
and fatal complications that quickly arose at 
head-quarters confirmed her first estimation of 
the practical dangers ahead. She clung to her 
belief in the sublime virtues of the masses, and 
that they would prove themselves grander, 
finer, more generous than all the mighty and 
the learned ones upon earth. But each of the 
popular leaders in turn was pronounced by her 
tried and found wanting. None of the party 
chiefs presented the desirable combination of 
perfect heroism and political genius. Michel, 
the apostle who of old had converted her to 



1 82 GEORGE SAND. 

the cause, she had long scorned as a deserter. 
Leroux, in the moment of action, was a non- 
entity. Barbes " reasons like a saint," she 
observes, " that is to say, very ill as regards the 
things of this world." Lamartine was a vain 
trimmer ; Louis Blanc, a sectarian ; Ledru- 
Rollin, a weathercock. " It is the characters 
that transgress," she complains na'fvely as one 
after the other disappointed her. Her own 
shortcomings on the score of patience and pru- 
dence were, it must be owned, no less grave. 
Her clear-sightedness was unaccompanied by the 
slightest dexterity of action. Years before, in 
one of the Lettres d'un Voyageur, she had passed 
a criticism on herself as a political worker, the 
accuracy of which she made proof of when 
carried into the vortex. " I am by nature 
poetical, but not legislative, warlike, if required, 
but never parliamentary. By first persuading 
me and then giving me my orders some use 
may be made of me, but I am not fit for discov- 
ering or deciding anything." 

Such an influence, important for raising an 
agitation, was null for controlling and directing 
the- forces thus set in motion. In the applica- 
tion of the theories she had accepted she was 
as weak and obscure as she was emphatic and 
eloquent in the preaching of them. Little help 
could she afford the republican leaders in deal- 



NOVELIST AND POLITICIAN. 1 83 

ing with the momentous question how to fulfill 
the immense but confused aspirations they had 
raised, how to show that their principles could 
answer the necessities of the moment. 

The worst, perhaps, that can be said of 
Madame Sand's political utterances is that they 
encouraged the people in their false belief — 
which belief she shared — that the social 
reforms so urgently needed could be worked 
rapidly by the Government, providing only it 
were willing. Over-boldness of expression on 
the part of advanced sections only increased the 
timidity and irresolution of action complained 
of in the administration. As the ranks of the 
Ministry split up into factions, Madame Sand 
attached herself to the party of Ledru-Rollin — 
in whom at that time she had confidence, — a 
party that desired to see him at the head of 
affairs, and that included Jules Favre, Etienne 
Arago, and Armand Barbes. No more zealous 
political partizan and agent than Madame Sand. 
The purpose in view was to preserve a cordial 
entente between these trusted chiefs and the 
masses whose interests they represented and 
on whose support they relied. To this end she 
got together meetings of working-men at her 
temporary Parisian abode, addressing them in 
speech and in print, and seemingly blind in the 
heat of the struggle to the enormous danger of 



1 84 GEORGE SAND. 

playing with the unmanageable, unreasoning 
instincts of the crowd. She still cherished the 
chimera dear to her imagination — the prospec- 
tive vision of the French people assembling 
itself in large masses, and deliberately and 
pacifically giving expression to its wishes. 

Into the Bulletin de la Republique there 
crept soon a tone of impatience and provocation, 
improper and dangerous in an official organ. 
The 1 6th number, which appeared on April 16, 
at a moment when the pending general elec- 
tions seemed likely to be overruled by reaction- 
aries, contained the startling declaration that if 
the result should thus dissatisfy the Paris peo- 
ple, these would manifest their will once more, 
by adjourning the decision of a false national 
representation. 

This sentence, which came from the pen of 
Madame Sand, was interpreted into a threat of 
intimidation from the party that would make 
Ledru-Rollin dictator, and created a consider- 
able stir. There was, indeed, no call for a fresh 
brand of discord in the republican ranks. 
Almost simultaneously came popular demon- 
strations of a menacing character. Ledru- 
Rollin disavowed the offending Bulletin; but 
the growing uneasiness of the bourgeoisie, the 
unruly discontent among the workmen, the 
Government, embarrassed and utterly disorgan- 



NOVELIST AND POLITICIAN. 1 85 

ized, was powerless to allay. Madame Sand 
began to perceive that the republic of her dreams, 
the "republican republic," was a forlorn hope, 
though still unconscious that even heavier 
obstacles to progress existed in the governed 
many than in the incapacity or personal ambi- 
tion of the governing few. She writes to her 
son from Paris, April 17 : — 

I am sad, my boy. If this goes on, and in some sense 
there should be no more to be done, I shall return to 
Nohant to console myself by being with you. I shall 
stay and see the National Assembly, after which I think 
I shall find nothing more here that I can do. 

At the Fete de la Fraternity April 20th, the 
spectacle of a million of souls putting aside and 
agreeing to forget all dissensions, all wrongs in 
the past and fears for the future, and uniting in 
a burst of joyous exultation, filled her with enthu- 
siasm and renewed hope. But the demonstration 
of the 1 5 th of May, of which she was next a spec- 
tator, besides its mischievous effect in alarming 
the quiet classes and exciting the agitators 
afresh, gave fatal evidence of the national 
disorganization and uncontrollable confusion 
everywhere prevailing, that had doomed the 
republic from the hour of its birth. 

Madame Sand, though she strenuously denied 
any participation or sympathy with this particu- 



1 86 GEORGE SAND. 

lar manifestation, was closely associated in the 
public mind with those who had aided and 
abetted the uprising. During the gathering of 
the populace, which she had witnessed, mingling 
unrecognized among the crowd, a female orator 
haranguing the mob from the lower windows of 
a cafe was pointed out to her, and she was 
assured that it was George Sand. During the 
repressive measures the administration was led 
to take she felt uncertain whether the arrest of 
Barbes might not be followed by her own. 
Some of her friends advised her to seek safety 
in Italy, where at that time the partisans of 
liberty were more united and sanguine. She 
turned a deaf ear. But she was severed now 
from all influential connection with those in 
authority. Before the end of May she left for 
Nohant, with her hopes for the rapid regenera- 
tion of her country on the wane. " I am afraid 
for the future," she writes to the imprisoned 
Barbes, shortly after these events. "I suffer 
for those who do harm and allow harm to 
be done without understanding it. ... I see 
nothing but ignorance and moral weakness pre- 
ponderating on the face of the globe." 

Through the medium of the press, notably of 
the journal La Vraie Republique> she continued 
to give plain expression to her sentiments, 
regardless of the political enmities she might 



NOVELIST AND POLITICIAN 1 87 

excite, and of the personal mortification to which 
she was exposed, even at Nohant, which with 
its inmates had recently become the mark for 
petty hostile "demonstrations/' Alluding to 
these, she writes : — 

Here in this Berry, so romantic, so gentle, so calm and 
good, in this land I love so tenderly, and where I have 
given sufficient proof to the poor and uneducated that I 
know my duties towards them, I myself in particular am 
looked upon as the enemy of the human race ; and if the 
Republic has not kept its promises, it is I, clearly, who 
am the cause. 

The term " communist,'' caught up and passed 
from mouth to mouth, was flung at Madame 
Sand and her son by the peasants, whose ideas 
as to its significance were not a little wild. "A 
pack of idiots," she writes to Madame Marliani, 
"who threaten to come and set fire to Nohant. 
Brave they are not, neither morally nor physi- 
cally ; and when they come this way and I walk 
through the midst of them they take off their 
hats ; but when they have gone by they sum- 
mon courage to shout, * Down with the commu- 
nists.' " 

The ingratitude of many who again and again 
had received succor from her and hers, she 
mighty excuse on account of their ignorance, but 
the extent of their ignorance was an obstacle to 



1 88 GEORGE SAND. 

immediate progress whose weight she had mis- 
calculated. 

" I shall keep my faith," she writes to Joseph 
Mazzini at this crisis — " the idea, pure and 
bright, the eternal truth will ever remain for me 
in my-heaven, unless I go blind. But hope is a 
belief in the near triumph of one's faith. I 
should not be sincere if I said that this state of 
mind had not been modified in me during these 
last months." 

The terrible insurrection of June followed, 
and overwhelmed her for the time. It was not 
only that her nature, womanly and poetical, had 
the greatest horror of bloodshed. The spec- 
tacle of the republicans slaughtering each other, 
of the evil passions stirred, the frightful anarchy, 
ended but at a frightful cost, the complete ex- 
tinction of all hopes, — nothing left rampant 
but fear, rancor and distrust, — was heart- 
rendering to her whose heart had been thrown 
into the national troubles. Great was the panic 
in Berry, an after-clap of the disturbances in the 
capital. Madame Sand's position became more 
unpleasant than ever. She describes herself as 
" blasee d outrages — threatened perpetually by 
the coward hatreds and imbecile terrors of 
country places." But to all this she was well- 
nigh insensible in her despair over the public 
calamities oppressing her nation — - the end of 



NOVELIST AND POLITICIAN 1 89 

all long-struggling aspirations in " frightful con- 
fusion, complete moral anarchy, a morbid con- 
dition, in most which the courageous of us lost 
heart and wished for death. 

" You say that the bourgeoisie prevails," she 
writes to Mazzini, in September, 1848, "and 
that thus it is quite natural that selfishness 
should be the order of the day. But why does 
the bourgeoisie prevail, whilst the people is 
sovereign, and the principle of its sovereignty, 
universal suffrage, is still standing ? We must 
open our eyes at last, and the vision of reality 
is horrible. The majority of the French people 
is blind, credulous, ignorant, ungrateful, wicked, 
and stupid ; it is bourgeoisie itself ! " 

Under no conceivable circumstances is it 
likely that Madame Sand would not very soon 
have become disgusted with active politics, for 
which her temperament unfitted her in every 
respect. Impetuous and uncompromisingly 
sincere, she was predestined to burn her fingers ; 
proud and independent, to become something of 
a scape-goat, charged with all the follies and 
errors which she repudiated, as well as with 
those for which she was more or less directly 
responsible. 

For some time to come she remained in com- 
parative seclusion at Nohant. She had not 
ceased her propaganda, though obliged to con- 



190 GEORGE SAND. 

duct it with greater circumspection. After the 
horrors of civil warfare, had come the cry for 
order at any price, and France had declared for 
the rule of Louis Bonaparte. During the course 
of events that consolidated his power, Madame 
Sand withdrew more and more from the strife 
of political parties. She had been, and we shall 
find her again, inclined to hope for better things 
for France from its new master than time 
showed to be in store. Other republicans 
besides herself had been disposed to build high 
their hopes of this future " saviour of society " 
in his youthful days of adversity and mysterious 
obscurity. When in confinement at the fortress 
of Ham, in 1844, Louis Napoleon sent to George 
Sand his work on the Extinction of Pauperism. 
She wrote back a flattering letter in which, 
however, with characteristic sincerity, she is 
careful to remind him that the party to which 
she belonged could never acknowledge any 
sovereign but the people ; that this they con- 
sidered to be incompatible with the sovereignty 
of one man ; that no miracle, no personification 
of popular genius in a single individual, could 
prove to them the right of that individual to 
sovereign power. 

Since then she had seen the people supreme, 
and been forced to own that they knew not 
what they wanted, nor whither they were going, 



NOVELIST AND POLITICIAN. 191 

divided in mind, ferocious in action. Among 
the leaders, she had seen some infatuated by 
the allurements of personal popularity, and the 
rest showing, by their inability to cope with 
the perplexities of administrative government, 
that so far philosophical speculations were of no 
avail in the actual solution of social problems. 
The result of her disenchantment was in no 
degree the overthrow of her political faith. A 
conviction was dawning on her that her social 
ideal was absolutely impracticable in any future 
that she and her friends could hope to live to 
see. But the belief on which she founded her 
social religion was one in which she never 
wavered ; a certainty that a progress, the very 
idea of which now seemed chimerical, would 
some day appear to all as a natural thing ; nay, 
that the stream of tendency would carry men 
towards this goal in spite of themselves. 



CHAPTER IX. 



PASTORAL TALES. 



"So you thought," wrote Madame Sand to a 
political friend, in 1849, "that I was drinking 
blood out of the skulls of aristocrats. Not I ! 
I am reading Virgil and learning Latin." And 
her best propaganda, as by and by she came to 
own, was not that carried on in journals such 
as La Vraie Republique and La Cause du Peuple. 
Through her works of imagination she has ex- 
ercised an influence more powerful and uni- 
versal, if indirect. 

Among the more than half a hundred 
romances of George Sand, there stands out a 
little group of three, belonging to the period 
we have now reached — the mezzo cammin of 
her life — creations in a special style, and over 
which the public voice, whether of fastidious 
critics or general readers, in France or abroad, 
has been and remains unanimous in praise. 

In these, her pastoral tales, she hit on a new 
and happy vein which she was peculiarly quali- 
fied to work, combining as she did, intimate 



PASTORAL TALES. 193 

knowledge of French peasant life with sym- 
pathetic interest in her subject and lively poetic 
fancy. Here she affronts no prejudices, advances 
no startling theories, handles no subtle, treach- 
erous social questions, and to these composi- 
tions in a perfectly original genre she brought 
the freshness of genius which "age cannot 
wither," together with the strength and finish 
of a practiced hand. 

Peasants had figured as accessories in her 
earlier works. The rustic hermit and philoso- 
pher, Patience, and Marcasse the rat-catcher, 
in Mauprat y are note-worthy examples. In 
1 844 had appeared Jeanne -, with its graceful 
dedication to Francoise Meillant, the unlettered 
peasant-girl who may have- suggested the work 
she could not read — one of a family of rural 
proprietors, spoken of by Madame Sand in a 
letter of 1 843 as a fine survival of a type already 
then fast . vanishing — of patriarchally con- 
stituted family-life, embodying all that was 
grand and simple in the forms of the olden 
time. 

In Jeanne ; Madame Sand had first ventured 
to make a peasant-girl the central figure of her 
novel, though still so far deferring to the 
received notions of what was essential in order 
to interest the "gentle " reader as to surround 
her simple heroine with personages of rank and 
7 



194 GEORGE SAND. 

education. Jeanne herself, moreover, is an ex- 
ceptional and a highly idealized type — as it were 
a sister to Joan, of Arc, not the inspired warrior- 
maid, but the visionary • shepherdess of the 
Vosges. Yet the creation is sufficiently real. 
The author had observed how favorable was the 
life of solitude and constant communion with 
nature led by many of these country children in 
their scattered homesteads, to the development 
of remarkable and tenacious individuality. So 
with the strange and poetical Jeanne, too innately 
refined to prosper in her rough human environ- 
ment, yet too fixedly simple to fare much better 
in more cultivated circles. She is the victim of 
a sort of celestial stupidity we admire and pity 
at once. In this study of a peasant heroine 
resides such charm as the book possesses, and 
the attempt was to lead on the author to the 
productions above alluded to, La Mareau Dia- 
ble, Francois le Champi, and La Petite Fadette. 
Of this popular trio the first had been published 
already two years before the Revolution, in 
1846 ; the second was appearing in the Feuille- 
ton of the Journal des Debats at the very mo- 
ment of the breaking of the storm, which 
interrupted its publication awhile. When those 
tumultuous months were over, and Madame 
Sand, thrown out of the hurly-burly of active 
politics, was brought back by the course of 



PASTORAL TALES. 195 

events to Nohant, she seems to have taken up 
her pen very much where she had laid it down. 
The break in her ordinary round of work made 
by the excitements of active statesmanship was 
hardly perceptible, and in 1 849 Le Champi was 
followed by La Petite Fadette. 

La Mare au Diable, George Sand's first tale of 
exclusively peasant-life, is usually considered her 
masterpiece in this genre. It was suggested to 
her, she tells us, by Holbein's dismal engraving 
of death coming to the husbandman, an old, 
gaunt, ragged, over-worked representative of his 
tribe — grim ending to a life of cheerless poverty 
and toil ! 

Here was the dark and painful side of the 
laborer's existence — a true picture, but not the 
whole truth. There was another and a bright 
side, which might just as allowably be repre- 
sented in art as the dreary one, and which she 
had seen and studied. In Berry extreme pov- 
erty was the exception, and the agriculturist's 
life appeared as it ought to be, healthy, calm, 
and simple, its laboriousness compensated by 
the soothing influences of nature, and of strong 
home affections. 

This little gem of a work is thoroughly well- 
known. The ploughing-scene in the Opening — 
ploughing as she had witnessed it sometimes in 
her own neighborhood, fresh, rough ground 



196 GEORGE SAND. 

broken up for tillage, the plough drawn by four 
yoke of young white oxen new to their work 
and but half-tamed, has a simplicity and 
grandeur of effect not easy to parallel in modern 
art. The motif of the tale is that you often go 
far to search for the good fortune that lies close 
to your door. Never was so homely an adage 
more freshly and prettily illustrated ; yet how 
slight are the materials, how plain is the out- 
line ! Germain, the well-to-do, widowed laborer, 
in the course of a few miles' ride, a journey 
undertaken in order to present himself and his 
addresses to the rich widow his father desires 
him to woo, discovers the real life-companion 
he wants in the poor girl-neighbor, whom he 
patronizingly escorts on her way to the farm 
where she is hired for service. It all slowly 
dawns upon him, in the most natural manner, 
as the least incidents of the journey call out her 
good qualities of head and heart — her helpful- 
ness in misadventure, forgetfulness of self, 
unaffected fondness for children, instinctively 
recognized by Germain's little boy, who, with 
his unconscious childish influence, is one of the 
prettiest features in the book. Germain, by his 
journey's end, has his heart so well engaged in 
the right' quarter that he is proof against the 
dangerous fascinations of the coquettish widow. 
There is a breath of poetry over the picture, 



PASTORAL TALES. 1 97 

but no denaturalization of the uncultured types. 
Germain is honest and warm-hearted, but not 
bright of understanding ; little Marie is wise 
and affectionate, but as unsentimentally-minded 
as the veriest realist could desire. The native 
caution and mercenary habit of thought of the 
French agricultural class are indicated by many 
a humorous touch in the pastorals of George 
Sand. 

Equally pleasing, though not aiming at the 
almost antique simplicity of the Mare au Diable, 
is the story of Franqois le Champi, the foundling, 
saved from the demoralization to which lack of 
the softening influences of home and parental 
affection predestine such unhappy children, 
through the tenderness his forlorn condition 
inspires in a single heart — that of Madeline 
Blanchet, the childless wife, whose own wrongs, 
patiently borne, have quickened her commisera- 
tion for the wrongs of others. Her sympathy, 
little though it lies in her power to manifest it, 
he feels, and its incalculable worth to him, 
which is such that the gratitude of a whole life 
cannot do more than repay it. 

Part of the narrative is here put into the 
mouth of a peasant, and told in peasant -lan- 
guage, or something approaching to it. Over 
the propriety of this proceeding, adopted also in 
Les Maitres Sonneurs, French critics are dis- 



198 GEORGE SAND. 

agreed, though for the most part they regret it. 
It is not for a foreigner to decide between 
them. One would certainly regret the absence 
of some of the extremely original and express- 
ive words and turns of speech current among 
the rural population, forms which such a method 
enabled her to introduce into the narrative as 
well as into the dialogue. 

La Petite Fadette is not only worthy of its 
predecessors but by many will be preferred to 
either. There is something particularly attrac- 
tive in the portraits of the twin brothers — 
partly estranged by character, wholly united by 
affection, — and in the figure of Fanchon Fadet, 
an original in humble life, which has made this 
little work a general favorite wherever it is 
known. 

These prose-idylls have been called " The 
Georgics of France." It is curious that in a 
country so largely agricultural, and where 
nature presents more variety of picturesque 
aspect than perhaps in any other in Europe, 
the poetic side of rural life should have been 
so sparingly represented in her imaginative 
literature. French poets of nature have mostly 
sought their inspiration out of their own land, 
" In France, especially," observes Theophile 
Gautier, " all literary people live in town, that 
is in Paris the centre, know little of what is 






PASTORAL TALES. 199 

unconnected with it, and most of them cannot 
tell wheat from barley, potatoes from beet- 
root." It was a happy inspiration that 
prompted Madame Sand to fill in the blank, in 
away all her own, and her task as we have seen 
was completed, revolutions notwithstanding. 
She owns to having then felt the attraction 
experienced in all time by those hard hit by 
public calamities, "to throw themselves back 
on pastoral dreams, all the more naive and 
childlike for the brutality and darkness tri- 
umphant in the world of activity." Tired of 
" turning round and round in a false circle of 
argument, of accusing the governing minority, 
but only to be forced to acknowledge after all 
that they were put there by the choice of the 
majority," she wished to forget it all : and her 
poetic temperament which unfitted her for 
success in politics assisted her in finding con- 
solation in nature. 

Moreover a district like Le Berry, singularly 
untouched by corruptions of the civilization, and 
preserving intact many old and interesting char- 
acteristics, was a field in which she might draw 
from reality many an attractive picture. She 
was as much rallied by town critics about her 
shepherdesses as though she had invented them. 
And yet she saw them every day, and they may 
be seen still by any wanderer in those lanes, 



200 GEORGE SAND. 

and at every turn, Fanchons, Maries, Nanons, 
as she described them, tending their flock of 
from five to a dozen sheep, or a few geese, a 
goat and a donkey, all day long between the tall 
hedgerows, or on the common, spinning the 
while, or possibly dreaming. A certain refine- 
ment of cast distinguishes the type. Eugene 
Delacroix, in a letter describing a village festi- 
val at Nohant, remarks that if positive beauty 
is rare among the natives, ugliness is a thing 
unknown. A gentle, passive cast of counte- 
nance prevails among the women : " They are 
all St. Annes," as the artist expresses it. The 
inevitable changes brought about by steam- 
communication, which have as yet only begun 
to efface the local habits and peculiarities, must 
shortly complete their work. George Sand's 
pastoral novels will then have additional value, 
as graphic studies of a state of things that has 
passed away. 

It does not appear that the merit of these 
stories was so quickly recognized as that of 
Indiana and Valentine. The author might 
abstract herself awhile from passing events and 
write idylls, but the public had probably not yet 
settled down into the proper state of mind for 
fully enjoying them. Moreover Madame Sand's 
antagonists in politics and social science, as 
though under the impression that she could not 



PASTORAL TALES. 201 

write except to advance some theory of which 
they disapproved, pre-supposed in these stories 
a set purpose of exalting the excellence of rustic 
as compared with polite life — of exaggerating 
the virtues of the poor, to throw into relief the 
vices of the rich. The romances themselves do 
riot bear out such a supposition. In them the 
author chooses exactly the same virtues to exalt, 
the same vices to condemn, as in her novels 
of refined society. She shows us intolerance, 
selfishness, and tyranny of custom marring or 
endangering individual happiness among the 
working-classes, as with their superiors? There 
are Philistines in her thatched cottages, as well 
as in her marble halls. Germain, in La Mare 
au Viable, has some difficulty to discover for 
himself, as well as to convince his family and 
neighbors, that in espousing the penniless Marie 
he is not marrying beneath him in every sense. 
Francois le Champi is a pariah, an outcast in 
the estimation of the rustic world. Fanchon 
Fadet, by her disregard of appearances and 
village etiquette, scandalizes the conservative 
minds of farmers and millers very much as 
Aurore Dupin scandalized the leaders of society 
at La Chatre. Most prominence is given to the 
more pleasing characters, but the existence of 
brutality and cupidity among the peasant classes 
is nowhere kept out of sight. Her long practi- 



202 GEORGE SAND. 

cal acquaintance with these classes indeed was 
fatal to illusions on the subject. The average 
son of the soil was as far removed as any other 
living creature from her ideal of humanity, and 
at the very time when she penned La Petite 
Fadette she was experiencing how far the 
ignorance, ill-will, and stupidity of her poorer 
neighbors could go. 

Thus she writes from Nohant to Barbes at 
Vincennes, November 1848: " Since May, I 
have shut myself up in prison in my retreat, 
where, though without the hardships of yours, I 
have more to suffer than you from sadness and 
dejection, . . . and am less in safety." 
Threatened by the violence and hatred of the 
people, she had painfully realized that she and 
her party had their most obstinate enemies 
among those whom they wished and worked to 
save and defend. 

Her profound discouragement finds expression 
in many of her letters from 1849 to 1852. The 
more sanguine hopes of Mazzini and other of 
her correspondents she desires, but no longer 
expects, to see fulfilled. She compares the 
moral state of France to the Russian retreat; 
the soldiers in the great army of progress seized 
with vertigo, and seeking death in fighting with 
each other. 

To her son, who was in Paris at the time of 
the disturbances in May, 1849, sne writes : — 



PASTORAL TALES. 203 

Come back, I implore you. I have only you in the 
world, and your death would be mine. I can still be of 
some small use to the cause of truth, but if I were to lose 
you it would be all over with me. I have not got the 
stoicism of Barbes and Mazzini. It is true they are men, 
and they have no children. Besides, in my opinion it is 
not in fight, not by civil war, that we shall win the cause 
of humanity in France. We have got universal suffrage. 
The worse for us if we do not know how to avail ourselves 
of it, for that alone can lastingly emancipate us, and the 
only thing that would give us the right to take up arms 
would be an attempt on their part to take away our right 
to vote. 

During the two years preceding the coup 
d'etat of December, 1851, life at Nohant had 
resumed its wonted cheerfulness of aspect 
Madame Sand was used to surround herself 
with young people and artistic people ; but now, 
amid their light-heartedness, she had for a 
period to battle with an extreme inward sad- 
ness, confirmed by the fresh evidence brought 
by these years of the demoralization in all ranks 
of opinion. " Your head is not very lucid when 
your heart is so deeply wounded," she had 
remarked already, after the disasters of 1848, 
" and how can one help suffering mortally from 
the spectacle of civil war and the slaughter 
among the people ? " 

To that was now added a loss of faith in the 
virtues of her own party, as well as of the 



204 GEORGE SAND. 

masses. It is no wonder if she fell out of love 
for awhile with the ideals of romance, with her 
own art of fiction, and the types of heroism that 
were her favorite creations. But if the shadow 
of a morbid pessimism crept over her mind, she 
could view it now as a spiritual malady which 
she had yet the will and the strength to live 
down ; as years before she had surmounted a 
similar phase of feeling induced by personal 
sorrow. 

Already, in 1847, she had begun to write her 
Memoirs, and reverting to them now, she found 
there work that suited her mood, as dealing 
with the past, more agreeable to contemplate 
just then than the present or the future. 

However, in September, 1850, we find her 
writing to Mazzini, — after dwelling on the pres- 
ent shortcomings of the people, and the mixture 
of pity and indignation with which they inspired 
her : " I turn back to fiction and produce, in 
art, popular types such as I see no longer ; but 
as they ought to be and might be." She alludes 
to a play on which she was engaged, and con- 
tinues : " The dramatic form, being new to me, 
has revived me a little of late ; it is the only 
kind of work into which I have been able to 
throw myself for a year." 

The events of December, 185 1, surprised her 
during a brief visit to Paris. Her hopes for 



PASTORAL TALES. 205 

her country had sunk so low, that she owns her- 
self at the moment not to have regarded the 
coup de*tat as likely to prove more disastrous to 
the cause of progress than any other of the vio- 
lent ends which threatened the existing political 
situation. She left the capital in the midst of 
the cannonade, and with her family around her 
at Nohant awaited the issue of the new dicta- 
torship. 

The wholesale arrests that followed imme- 
diately, and filled the country with stupefac- 
tion, made havoc on all sides of her. Among 
the victims were comrades of her childhood, 
numbers of her friends and acquaintance and 
their relatives — as well in Berry as in the 
capital — many arrested solely on suspicion of 
hostility to the President's views, yet none the 
less exposed to chances of death, or captivity, 
or exile. 

The crisis drove Madame Sand once more to 
quit the privacy of her country life, but this 
time in the capacity of intecessor with the 
conqueror for his victims. She came up to 
Paris, and on January 20, 1852, addressed a 
letter to the President, imploring his clemency 
for the accused generally in an admirably elo- 
quent appeal to his sentiments as well of justice 
as of generosity. The plea she so forcibly 
urged, that according to his own professions 



2Ctf GEORGE SAND. 

mere opinion was not to be prosecuted as a 
crime, whereas the so-called " preventive 
measures " had involved in one common ruin 
with his active opponents those who had been 
mere passive spectators of late events, was, of 
course, unanswerable. The future Emperor 
granted her two audiences within a week at the 
Elysee, in answer to her request, and he suc- 
ceeded on the first occasion in convincing her 
that the acts of iniquity and intimidation per- 
petrated as by his authority were as completely 
in defiance of his public intentions as of his 
private principles. As a personal favor to her- 
self, he readily offered her the release of any of 
the political prisoners that she choose to name, 
and promised that a general amnesty should 
speedily follow. She left him, reassured to 
some extent as to the fate in store for her coun- 
try. The second interview she had solicited in 
order to plead the cause of one of her personal 
friends, condemned to transportation. The 
mission was a delicate one, for her client would 
engage himself to nothing for the future, and 
Madame Sand, in petitioning for his release, 
saw no better course open to her than as ex- 
pressed by herself, frankly to denounce him to 
the President as his " incorrigible personal en- 
emy." Upon this the President granted her the 
prisoner's full pardon at once. Madame Sand 



PASTORAL TALES. 20? 

was naturally touched by this ready response 
of the generous impulse to which she had 
trusted. To those who cast doubts on the 
sincerity of any good sentiment in such a 
quarter, she very properly replied that it was 
not for her to be the first to discredit the gen- 
erosity she had so successfully appealed to. 

But between her republican friends, loth to 
owe their deliverance to the tender mercies of 
Louis Napoleon, and her own desire to save 
their lives and liberties, and themselves and 
their families from ruin and despair, she found 
her office of mediator a most unthankful one. 
She persisted however in unwearying appli- 
cations for justice and mercy, addressed both 
to the dictator directly, and through his cousin, 
Prince Napoleon (Jerome), between whom and 
herself there existed a cordial esteem. She 
clung as long as she could to her belief in the 
public virtue of the President, or Emperor as 
he already began to be called here and there, 
But the promised clemency limited itself to a 
number of particular cases for whom she had 
specially interceded. 

The subsequent conditions of France pre- 
cluded all free emission of socialist or republican 
opinions, but Madame Sand desired nothing 
better than to send in her political resignation ; 
and it is impossible to share the regret of some 



208 GEORGE SAND. 

of her fellow-republicans at finding her again 
devoting her best energies to her art of fiction, 
and in November, 1853, writing to Mazzini such 
words of wisdom as these : — 

You are suprised that I can work at literature. For 
my part, I thank God that he has let me preserve this 
faculty ; for an honest and clear conscience like mine 
still finds, apart from all debate, a work of moralization 
to pursue. What should I do if I relinquish my task, 
humble though it be ? Conspire ? It is not my vocation ; 
I should make nothing of it. Pamphlets? I have 
neither the wit nor the wormwood required for that. 
Theories ? We have made too many, and have fallen to 
disputing, which is the grave of all truth and all strength. 
I am, and always have been, artist before everything else. 
I know that mere politicians look on artists, with great 
contempt, judging them by some of those mountebank- 
types which are a disgrace to art. But you, my friend, 
you well know that a real artist is as useful as the priest 
and the warrior, and that when he respects what is true 
and what is good, he is in the right path where the divine 
blessing will attend him. Art belongs to all countries 
and to all time, and its special good is to live on when all 
else seems to be dying. That is why Providence delivers 
it from passions too personal or too general, and has 
given to its organization patience and persistence, an 
enduring sensibility, and that contemplative sense upon 
which rests invincible faith. 

Her novel, Les Maitres Sonneurs, the first- 
fruits of the year 1853, is what most will con- 
sider a very good equivalent for party pamphlets 
and political diatribes. 



PASTORAL TALES. 20g 

When composing La Mare au Diable, in 1846, 
Madame Sand looked forward to writing a series 
of such peasant tales, to be collectively entitled 
Les Veillees du Chanvreur, the hemp-beaters 
being, as will be recollected, the Scheherazades 
of each village. Their number was never to be 
thus augmented, but the idea is recalled by the 
chapter-headings of Les Maitres Sonneurs, in 
which Etienne Despardieu, or Tiennet, the rustic 
narrator, tells, in the successive veillees of a 
month, the romance of his youth. It is a work 
of a very different type to the rural tales that 
had preceded it, and should be regarded apart 
from them. It is longer, more complex in 
fo'rm and sentiment, more of an ideal composi- 
tion. Les Maitres Sonneurs, is a delightful 
pastoral, woodland fantasy, standing by itself 
among romances much as stands a kindred 
work of imagination, "As You Like It," among 
plays, yet thoroughly characteristic of George 
Sand, the nature-lover, the seer into the mys- 
teries of human character, and the imaginative 
artist. The agreeable preponderates in the 
story, but it has its tragic features and its serious 
import. A picturesque and uncommon setting 
adds materially to its charm. Every thread 
tells in this delicate piece of fancy-work, and 
the weaver's art is indescribable. But one may 
note the ingenuity with which four or five 



2IO GEORGE SAND. 

interesting yet perfectly natural types are 
brought into a group and contrasted ; improb- 
able incidents so handled as not to strike a dis- 
cordant note, the characteristics of the past 
introduced without ever losing hold of the links, 
the points of identity between past and present. 
The scene is the hamlet of Nohant itself ; the 
time is a century ago, when the country, half 
covered with forest, was wilder, the customs 
rougher, the local coloring stronger than even 
Madame Sand in her childhood had known 
them. The personages belong to the rural 
proprietor class. The leading characters are all 
somewhat out of the common, but such exist in 
equal proportions in all classes of society, and 
there is ample evidence besides George Sand's 
of notable examples among the French peas- 
antry. The plot and its interest lie in the 
development of character and the fine tracing 
of the manner in which the different characters 
are influenced by circumstances and by each 
other. If the beauty of rustic maidens, and of 
rustic songs and dance-music, as here described, 
seem to transcend probability, it must be 
remembered it is a peasant who speaks of these 
wonders, and as wonders they might appear to 
his limited experience. As a musical novel, it 
has the ingenious distinction of being told from 
the point of view of the sturdy and honest, but 



-PASTORAL TALES. 211 

unartistic and non-musical Tiennet ; a typical 
Berrichon. Madame Sand was of opinion that 
during the long occupation of Berry by the 
English the two races had blended extensively, 
and she would thus account for some of the 
heavier, more inexpansive qualities of our nation 
having become characteristic of this French 
province. 

More than one English reader of Les Maitres 
Sonneurs may have been struck by the picture 
there presented of peasant-folk in a state of 
peace and comfort, such as we do not suppose 
to have been common in France before the Rev- 
olution. Madame Sand has elsewhere explained 
how, as a fact, Nohant, and other estates in the 
region round about, had enjoyed some immunity 
from the worst abuses of the ancien regime. 
Several of these properties, as it happened, had 
fallen to women or minors — widows, elderly 
maiden ladies, who, and their agents, spared 
the holders and cultivators of the soil the exac- 
tions which, by right or by might, its lords were 
used to levy. " So the peasants," she writes, 
" were accustomed not to put themselves to any 
inconvenience ; and when came the Revolution 
they were already so well relieved virtually from 
feudal bonds that they took revenge on nobody." 
A new seigneur of Nohant, coming to take pos- 
session, and thinking to levy his utmost dues, 



212 * GEORGE SAND. 

in cash and in kind, found his rustic tenants 
turn a deaf ear to his summons. Ere he could 
insist the storm burst, but it brought no convul- 
sion, and merely confirmed an independence 
already existing. 

Les Maitres Sonneurs, whilst illustrating 
some of the most striking merits of George 
Sand, is free from the defects often laid to her 
charge ; and although of all her pastorals it 
must suffer the most when rendered in any 
language but the original, it is much to be 
regretted that some good translation of this 
work should not put it within the reach of all 
English readers. 



CHAPTER X. 

PLAYS AND LATER NOVELS. 

There are few eminent novelists that have 
not tried their hands at writing for the stage ; 
and Madame Sand had additional inducements 
to do so, beyond those of ambition satiated with 
literary success, and tempted by the charm of 
making fresh conquest of the public in a more 
direct and personal fashion. 

From early childhood she had shown a strong 
liking for the theatre. The rare performances 
given by travelling acting-companies at La 
Chatre had been her greatest delight when a 
girl. At the convent-school she had arranged 
Moliere from memory for representation by 
herself and her school-fellows, careful so to 
modify the piece as to avoid all possibility of 
shocking the nuns. Thus the Sisters applauded 
Le Malade Imaginaire without any suspicion 
that the author was one whose works, for them, 
were placed under a ban, and whose very name 
they held in devout abhorrence. She inherited 



214 GEORGE SAND. 

from her father a' taste for acting, which she 
transmitted to her children. We have seen 
her during her literary novitiate in Paris, a 
studious observer at all theatres, from the 
classic boards of the Francais down to the 
lowest of popular stages, the Funambules, where 
reigned at that time a real artist in pantomime, 
Debureau. His Pierrot, a sort of modified 
Pulchinello, was renowned, and attracted more 
fastidious critics to his audience than the 
Paris artisans whose idol he was. Since then 
Madame Sand had numbered among her per- 
sonal friends such leading dramatic celebrities 
as Madame Dorval, Bocage, and Pauline Garcia. 
" I like actors," she says playfully, " which has 
scandalized some austere people. I have also 
been found fault with for liking the peasantry. 
Among these I have passed my life, and as I 
found them, so have I described them. As 
these, in the light of the sun, give us our daily 
bread for our bodies, so those by gaslight give 
us our daily bread of fiction, so needful to the 
wearied spirit, troubled by realities." Peasants 
and players seem to be the types of humanity 
farthest removed from each other, and it is 
worthy of remark that George Sand was equally 
successful in her presentation of both. 

Her preference for originality and spon- 
taneity before all other qualities in a dramatic 



PLAYS AND LATER NOVELS. 21$ 

artist was characteristic of herself, though not 
of her nation. Thus it was that Madame Dor- 
val, the heroine of Antony and Marion Delorme, 
won her unbounded admiration. Even in 
Racine she clearly preferred her to Mile. 
Mars, as being a less studied actress, and one 
who abandoned herself more to the inspiration 
of the moment. The effect produced, as 
described by Madame Sand, will be understood 
by all keenly alive, like herself, to the enjoy- 
ment of dramatic art. " She " (Madame Dor- 
val) " seemed to me to be myself, more expan- 
sive, and to express in action and emotion all 
that I seek to express in writing." And com- 
pared with such an art, in which conception 
and expression are simultaneous, her own art of 
words and phrases would at such moments 
appear to her as but a pale reflection. 

Bocage, the great character actor of his time, 
was another who likewise appealed particularly 
to her sympathies, as the personation, on the 
boards, of the protest of the romantic school 
against the slavery of convention and tradition. 
Her acquaintance with him dated from the 
first representation of Hugo's Lucrhe Borgia, 
Feburary, 1833, when Bocage and the author of 
Indiana, then strangers to each other, chanced 
to sit side by side. In their joint enthusiasm 
over the play they made the beginning of a 



2l6 GEORGE SAND. 

thirty years' friendship, terminated only by 
Bocage's death in 1862. "It was difficult not 
to quarrel with him," she says of this popular 
favorite ; " he was susceptible and violent ; it 
was impossible not to be reconciled with him 
quickly. He was faithful and magnanimous. 
He forgave you admirably for wrongs you had 
never done him, and it was as good and real as 
though the pardon had been actual and well- 
founded, so strong was his imagination, so com- 
plete his good faith." 

The assistance of Madame Dorval, added to 
the strength of the Comedie Francaise com- 
pany, did not, however, save from failure Mad- 
ame Sand's first drama, Cosima> produced, as 
will be remembered, in 1840. She allowed 
nearly a decade to elapse before again seriously 
competing for theatrical honors, by a second 
effort in a different style, and more satisfactory 
in its results. 

This, a dramatic adaptation by herself of her 
novel, Franqois le Champi, was produced at the 
Odeon in the winter of 1849. Generally speak- 
ing, to make a good play out of a good novel, 
the playwright must begin by murdering the 
novel ; and here, as in all George Sand's dra- 
matic versions of her romances, we seem to miss 
the best part of the original. However, the 
curious simplicity of the piece, the rustic 



PLAYS AND LATER NOVELS. 2iy 

scenes and personages, here faithfully copied 
from reality, unlike the conventional village and 
villager of opera comique, and the pleasing 
sentiment that runs through the tale, were 
found refreshing by audiences upon whom the 
sensational incidents and harrowing emotions 
of their modern drama were already beginning 
to pall. The result was a little stage triumph 
for Madame Sand. It helped to draw to her 
pastoral tales the attention they deserved, but 
had not instantly won in all quarters. Theo- 
phile Gautier writes playfully of this piece : 
"The success of Francois le Champi has given 
all our vaudeville writers an appetite for rus- 
ticity. Only let this go on a little, and we 
shall be inundated by what has humorously 
been called the 'ruro-drama.' Morvan hats 
and Berrichon head-dresses will invade the 
scenes, and no language be spoken but in dia- 
lect." 

Madame Sand was naturally encouraged to 
repeat the experiment. This was done in 
Claudie (185 1) and Le Pressoir (1853), ruro- 
dramas both, and most favorably received. 
The first-named has a simple and pathetic story, 
and, as usual with Madame Sand's plays, it was 
strengthened at its first production by the 
support of some of the best acting talent in 
Paris — Fechter, then a rising jeune premier, 



218 GEORGE SAND. 

and the veteran Bocage ably representing, 
respectively, youth and age. Old Berrichon 
airs were introduced with effect, as also such 
picturesque rustic festival customs as the 
ancient harvest-home ceremony, in which the 
last sheaf is brought on a wagon, gaily decked 
out with poppies, cornflowers and ribbons, and 
receives a libation of wine poured by the hand 
of the oldest or youngest person present. 

"But what the theatre can never reproduce," 
laments Madame Sand, "is the majesty of the 
frame — the mountain of sheaves solemnly 
approaching, drawn by three pairs of enormous 
oxen, the whole adorned with flowers, with 
fruit, and with fine little children perched upon 
the top of the last sheaves." 

Henceforward a good deal of her time and 
interest continued to be absorbed by these 
dramatic compositions. But though mostly 
eliciting during her lifetime a gratifying amount 
of public favor and applause, the best of them 
cannot for an instant be placed in the same 
high rank as her novels. For with all her wide 
grasp of the value of dramatic art and her exact 
appreciation of the strength and weakness of 
the acting world, her plays remain, to great 
expectations, uniformly disappointing. Her 
specialty in fiction lies in her favorite art of 
analyzing and putting before us, with extreme 



PLAYS AND LATER NOVELS. 219 

clearness, the subtlest ramifications, the most 
delicate intricacies of feeling and thought. A 
stage audience has its eyes and ears too busy to 
give its full attention to the finer complications 
of sentiment and motive ; or, at least, in order 
to keep its interest alive and its understanding 
clear, an accentuation of outline is needed, 
which she neglects even to seek. 

Her assertion, that the niceties of emotion 
are sufficient to found a good play upon, no one 
now will dream of disputing. But for this an art 
of execution is needed of which she had not the 
instinct. The action is insufficient, or rather, 
the sense of action is not conveyed. The 
slightness of plot — a mere thread in most in- 
stances — requires that the thread shall at least 
be never allowed to drop. But she cuts or 
slackens it perpetually, long arguments and 
digressions intervening, and the dialogue, whose 
monotony is unrelieved by wit, nowhere com- 
pensates for the limited interest of the action. 
Awkward treatment is but half felt when sub- 
ject and situations are dramatically strong; but 
plays with so airy and impalpable a basis as 
these need to be sustained by the utmost per- 
fection of construction, concision and polish of 
dialogue. 

Her novel Mauprat has many dramatic points, 
and she received a score of applications for 



220 GEORGE SAND. 

leave to adapt it to the stage. She preferred 
to prepare the version herself, and it was played 
in the winter of 1853-4, with moderate success. 
But it suffers fatally from comparison with its 
original. An extreme instance is Flaminio 
(1854), a protracted drama, drawn by Madame 
Sand from her novelette Teverino. This is a 
fantasy-piece whose audacity is redeemed, as 
are certain other blemishes, by the poetic sug- 
gestiveness of the figure of Madeline, the bird- 
charmer ; whilst the picturesque sketch of Tev- 
erino, the idealized Italian bohemian, too indo- 
lent to turn his high natural gifts to any account, 
has proved invaluable to the race of novelists, 
who are not yet tired of reproducing it in large. 
The work is one addressed mainly to the im- 
agination. 

In the play we come down from the clouds ; 
the poetry is gone, taste is shocked, fancy 
uncharmed, the improbabilities become gro- 
tesque, and the whole is distorted and tedious. 
Madame Sand's personages are never weary of 
analyzing their sentiments. Her flowing style, 
so pleasant to read, carries us swiftly and easily 
through her dissertations in print, before we 
have time to tire of them. On the stage such 
colloquies soon appear lengthy and unnatural. 
The climax of absurdity is reached in Flaminio, 
where we find the adventurer expatiating to the 



PLAYS AND LATER NOVELS. 221 

man of the world on "the divinity of his 
essence." 

There is scarcely a department of theatrical 
literature in which Madame Sand does not 
appear as an aspirant. She was a worshipper 
of Shakespeare, acknowledging him as the king 
of dramatic writers. For her attempt to adapt 
" As You Like It" to suit the tastes of a Paris- 
ian audience, she disarms criticism by a preface 
in the form of a letter to M. Regnier, of the 
Comedie Francaise, prefixed to the printed play. 
Here she says plainly that to resolve to alter 
Shakespeare is to resolve to murder, and that 
she aims at nothing more than at giving the 
French public some idea of the original. In 
" As You Like It" the license of fancy taken 
is too wide for the piece to be safely repre- 
sented to her countrymen, since it must jar 
terribly on "that French reason which," remarks 
Madame Sand, " we are so vain of, and which 
deprives us of so many originalities quite as 
precious as itself." The fantastic, which had 
so much attraction for her (possibly a result of 
her part German origin), is a growth that has 
hard work to flourish on French soil. The 
reader will remember the fate of Weber's Frei- 
sckutz, outrageously hissed when first produced 
at Paris in its original form. Nine days later it 
was reproduced, having been taken to pieces 



222 GEORGE SAND. 

and put together again by M. Castil-Blaze, and 
thus as Robin des Bois it ran for 357 nights. 
The reckless imagination that distinguishes the 
Shakespearian comedy and does not shrink 
before the introduction of a lion and a serpent 
into the forest of Arden, and the miraculous 
and instantaneous conversion of the wretch Oli- 
ver into a worthy suitor for Celia, needed to 
be toned down for acceptance by the Parisians. 
But Madame Sand was less fortunate than M. 
Castil-Blaze. Her version, produced at the 
Theatre Francais, in 1856, failed to please, 
although supported by such actors as Delaunay, 
Arnold-Plessy, and Favart. Macready, who 
had made Madame Sand's acquaintance in 1845, 
when he was giving Shakespearian perform- 
ances in Paris, and whom she greatly admired, 
dedicating to him her little theatrical romance 
Le Chateau des Desertes, was present at this 
representation and records it as a failure. But 
of her works for the stage, which number over 
a score, few like her Cotnme il vous plaira 
missed making some mark at the time, the 
prestige of her name and the exceptionally 
favorable circumstances under which they were 
produced securing more than justice for their 
intrinsic merit. It was natural that she should 
over-estimate their value and continue to add to 
their number. These pieces would be carefully 



PLAYS AND LATER NOVELS. 223 

rehearsed on the little stage in the house at 
Nohant, often with the aid of leading profes- 
sional actors ; and there, at least, the success 
was unqualified. 

Her ingenious novel Les Beaux Messieurs 
Bois Dore, dramatized with the aid of Paul 
Meurice and acted in 1862, was a triumph for 
Madame Sand and her friend Bocage. The 
form and spirit of this novel seem inspired by 
Sir Walter Scott, and though far from perfect, 
it is a striking instance of the versatility of her 
imaginative powers. The leading character of 
the septuagenarian Marquis, with his many 
amiable virtues, and his one amiable weakness, 
a longing to preserve intact his youthfulness of 
appearance as he has really preserved his youth- 
fulness of heart, is both natural and original, 
comic and half pathetic withal. The part in 
the play seemed made for Bocage, and his heart 
was set upon undertaking it. But his health 
was failing at the time, and the manager hesi- 
tated about giving him the role. " Take care, 
my friend," wrote Bocage to Madame Sand; 
" perhaps I shall die if I play the part ; but if I 
'play it not, I shall die of that, to a certainty." 
She insisted, and play it he did, to perfection, 
she tells us. "He did not act the Marquis de 
Bois Dore ; he was the personage himself, as the 
author had dreamt him." It was to be his last 



224 GEORGE SAND. 

achievement, and he knew it. " It is my end," 
he said one night, " but I shall die like a soldier 
on the field of honor." And so he did, con- 
tinuing to play the r61e up till a few days before 
his death. 

More lasting success has attended Madame 
Sand in two of the lightest of society comedies, 
Le Mariage de Victorine and Le Marquis de 
Villemer, which seem likely to take a perma- 
nent place in the repertoire of the French stage. 
The first, a continuation that had suggested 
itself to her of Sedaine's century-old comedy, 
Le PJiilosopJie sans le savoir, escapes the ill fate 
that seems to attend sequels in general. It is 
of the slightest materials, but holds together, 
and is gracefully conceived and executed. First 
produced at the Gymnase in 185 1, it was revived 
during the last year of Madame Sand's life in a 
manner very gratifying to her, being brought 
out with great applause at the Comedie Fran- 
chise, preceded on each occasion by Sedaine's 
play, and the same artists appearing in both. 

The excellent dramatic version of her popular 
novel Le Marquis de Villemer, first acted in 
1 864, is free from the defects that weaken most 
of her stage compositions. It is said that in 
preparing it she accepted some hints from Alex- 
ander Dumas the younger. Whatever the cause, 
the result is a play where characters, composi- 
tion and dialogue leave little to be desired. 



PLAYS AND LATER NOVELS. 225 

L Autre, her latest notable stage success, 
brings us down to 1870, when it was acted at 
the Gymnasc, Madame Sarah Bernhardt imper- 
sonating the heroine.- This not very agreeable 
play is derived, with material alterations, from 
Madame Sand's agreeable novel La Confession 
d'unejeune Fille, published in 1864. 

If, however, her works for the stage, which 
fill four volumes, added but little, in proportion 
to their quantity, to her permanent fame, her 
dramatic studies added fresh interest and variety 
to her experience, which brought forth excellent 
fruit in her novels. Actors, their art and way 
of life have fared notoriously badly in fiction. 
Such pictures have almost invariably fallen into 
the extreme of unreality or that of caricature, 
whether for want of information or want of 
sympathy in those who have drawn them. 

The subject, always attractive for Madame 
Sand, is one in which she is always happy. 
Already in the first year of her literary career 
her keen appreciation of the art and its higher 
influences had prompted her clever novelette 
La Marquise. Here she illustrates the power 
of the stage as a means of expression — of the 
truly inspired actor, though his greatness be 
but momentary, and his heroism a semblance, 
to strike a like chord in the heart of the spec- 
tator — and, in a corrupt and artificial age, to 
8 



226 GEORGE SAND. 

keep alive some latent faith in the ideal. Since 
then the stage and players had figured repeat- 
edly in her works. Sometimes she portrays a 
perfected type, such as Consuelo, or Imperia in 
Pierre qui roule, but always side by side with 
more earthly and faulty representatives such as 
Corilla and Anzoleto, or Julia and Albany, in 
Narcisse, incarnations of the vanity and insta- 
bility that are the chief dangers of the profes- 
sion, drawn with unsparing realism. In Le 
Chateau des Desertes we find further many 
admirable theories and suggestive ideas on the 
subject of the regeneration of the theatre. But 
it fared with her theatrical as with her political 
philosophy: she failed in its application, not 
because her theories were false, but for want of 
practical aptitude for the craft whose principles 
she understood so well. 

It is impossible here to do more than cast a 
rapid glance over the literary work accomplished 
by George Sand during the first decade of the 
empire. It includes more than a dozen novels, 
of unequal merit, but of merit for the most 
part very high. The Histoir de ma Vie was 
published in 1 85 5. It is a study of chosen passages 
out of her life, rather than a connected auto- 
biography. One out of the four volumes is 
devoted to the story of her father's life before 
her birth ; two more to the story of her child- 



PLAYS AND LATER NOVELS. 22J 

hood and girlhood. The fourth rather indicates 
than fully narrates the facts of her existence 
from the time of her marriage till the Revolu- 
tion of 1848. It offers to her admirers invalua- 
ble glimpses into her life and mind, and is a 
highly interesting and characteristic compo- 
sition, if a most irregular chronicle. It has 
given rise to two most incompatible-sounding 
criticisms. Some have been chiefly struck by 
its amazing unreserve, and denounced the over- 
frankness of the author in revealing herself to 
the public. Others complain that she keeps on 
a mask throughout, and never allows us to see 
into the recesses of her mind. Her passion for 
the analysis of sentiment has doubtless led her 
here, as in her romances, to give very free 
expression to truths usually better left unspoken. 
But her silence on many points about which 
her readers, whether from mere curiosity or 
some more honorable motive, would gladly have 
been informed, was then inevitable. It could 
not have been broken without wounding the 
susceptibilities of living persons, which she did 
right in respecting, at the cost of disappoint- 
ment to an inqusitive public. 

In January, 1855, a terrible domestic sorrow 
befell her in the loss of her six-years-old grand- 
child, Jeanne Clesinger, to whom she was 
devoted. It affected her profoundly. " Is 



228 GEORGE SAND. 

there a more mortal grief," she exclaims, "than 
to outlive, yourself, those who should have 
bloomed upon your grave ? " The blow told 
upon her mentally and physically ; she could not 
rally from its effects, till persuaded to seek a 
restorative in change of air and scene, which 
happily did their work. 

"I was ill," she says, when writing of these 
events to a lady correspondent, later in the 
same year ; " my son took me away to Italy. 

. . . . I have seen Rome, revisited Flor- 
ence, Genoa, Frascati, Spezia, Marseilles. I 
have walked a great deal, been out in the sun, 
the rain, the wind, for whole days out of doors. 
This, for me, is a certain remedy, and I have 
come back cured." 

Those who care to follow the mind of George 
Sand on this Italian journey may safely infer 
from La Daniella, a novel written after this 
tour, and the scene of which is laid in Rome 
and the Campagna, that the author's strongest 
impression of the Eternal City was one of dis- 
illusion. Her hero, a Berrichon artist on his 
travels, confesses to a feeling of uneasiness and 
regret rather than of surprise and admiration. 
The ancient ruins, stupendous in themselves, 
seemed to her spoilt for effect by their situ- 
ation in the center of a modern town. " Of 
the Rome of the past not enough exists to 



PLAYS. AND LATER NOVELS. 229 

overwhelm me with its majesty; of the Rome 
of the present not enough to make me forget 
the first, and much too much to allow me to see 
her." 

But the Baths of Caracalla, where the picture 
is not set in a frame of hideous houses, 
awakened her native enthusiasm. " A grandiose 
ruin," she exclaims, " of colossal proportions ; 
it is shut away, isolated, silent and respected. 
There you feel the terrific power of the Caesars, 
and the opulence of a nation intoxicated with 
its royalty over the world." 

So in the Appian Way, the road of tombs, 
the fascination of desolation — a desolation there 
unbroken and undisfigured by modern build- 
ings or otherwise — she felt to the full. But 
whatever came under her notice she looked on 
with the eye of the poet and artist, not of the 
archaeologist, and approved or disapproved or 
passed over it accordingly. 

The beauties of nature, at Tivoli and Frascati, 
appealed much more surely to her sympathies. 
But of certain sites in the Campagna - much 
vaunted by tourists and hand-books she remarks 
pertinently : "If you were to pass this village" 
(Marino) "on the railway within a hundred 
miles of Paris, you would not pay it the slightest 
attention." Such places had their individuality, 
but she upheld that there is not a corner in the 



230 GEORGE SAND. 

universe, " however common-place it may appear, 
but has a character of its own, unique in this 
world, for any one who is disposed to feel or 
comprehend it." In one of her village tales a 
sagacious peasant professes his profound con- 
tempt for the man who cannot like the place he 
belongs to. 

Neither the grottoes and cascades of Tivoli, 
the cypress and ilex gardens of Frascati and 
Albano, nor the ruins of Tusculum, were ever 
so pleasant to her eyes as the poplar-fringed 
banks of the Indre, the corn-land sand hedge- 
rows of Berry, and the rocky borders of the 
Creuse at Crozant and Argenton. She had not 
ceased making fresh picturesque discoveries in 
her own neighborhood. Of these she records 
an instance in her pleasant Promenades autour 
d'un village, a lively sketch of a few days' walk- 
ing-tour on the banks of the Creuse, undertaken 
by herself and some naturalist friends in June, 
1857. In studying the interesting and secluded 
village of Gargilesse, with its tenth-century 
church and crypt with ancient frescoes, its 
simple and independent-minded population, in 
following the course of a river whose natural 
wild beauties, equal to those of the Wye, are as 
yet undisfigured here by railroad or the hand of 
man, lingering on its banks full of summer 
flowers and butterflies, exploring the castles of 



PLAYS AND LATER NOVELS. 23 1 

Chateaubrun and La Prugne au Pot, George 
Sand is happier, more herself, more communi- 
cative than in Rome, " the museum of the uni- 
verse." 

The years 1858 to 1861 show her to us in 
the fullest conservation of her powers and in 
the heyday of activity. The group of novels 
belonging to this period, the climax of what 
may be called her second career, is sufficiently 
remarkable for a novelist who was almost a 
sexagenarian, including Elle et Lui, V Homme 
de Neige, La Ville Noire, Constance Verrier, Le 
Marquis de Villemer and Valvedre. Elle et Lui > 
in which George Sand at last broke silence in 
her own defense on the subject of her rupture 
with Alfred de Musset, first appeared in the 
Revue des Deux Mondes, 1859. Though many 
of the details are fictitious, the author here told 
the history of her relations with the deceased 
poet much too powerfully for her intention to 
be mistaken or to escape severe blame. That a 
magnanimous silence would have been the 
nobler course on her part towards the child of 
genius whose good genius she had so signally 
failed to be, need not be disputed. It must be 
remembered, however, that De Musset on his 
side had not refrained during his lifetime from 
denouncing in eloquent verse the friend he had 
quarreled with, and satirizing her in pungent 



232 GEORGE SAND. 

prose. Making every possible allowance for 
poetical figures of speech, he had said enough 
to provoke her to retaliate. It is impossible to 
suppose that there was not another side to such 
a question. But Madame Sand could not 
defend herself without accusing her lost lover. 
She often proved herself a generous adver- 
sary — too generous, indeed, for her own advan- 
tage — and in this instance it was clearly not 
for her own sake that she deferred her apology. 
It is even conceivable that the poet, when in 
a just frame of mind, and not seeking inspira- 
tion for his Nuit de Mai or Histoire dun Merle 
blancy would not have seen in Elle et Ltd a falsi- 
fication of the spirit of their history. The the- 
orizing of the outside world in such matters is 
of little worth ; but the novel bears, conspicu- 
ously among Madame Sand's productions, the 
stamp of a study from real life, true in its lead- 
ing features. And the conduct of the heroine, 
Therese, though accounted for and eloquently 
defended, is by no means, as related, ideally 
blameless. After an attachment so strong as to 
induce a seriously-minded person, such as she is 
represented, to throw aside for it all other con- 
siderations, the hastiness with which, on discov- 
ering her mistake, she entertains the idea of 
bestowing her hand, if not her heart, on another, 
is an exhibition of feminine inconsequence 



PLAYS AND LATER NOVELS. 233 

which no amount of previous misconduct on the 
part of her lover, Laurent, can justify. Further, 
Therese is self-deceived in supposing her pas- 
sion to have died out with her esteem. She 
breaks with the culprit and engages her word 
to a worthier man. But enough remains over 
of the past to prevent her from keeping the 
promise she ought never to have made. When 
she sacrifices her unselfish friend to return to 
the lover who has made her miserable, she is 
sincere, but not heroic. She is too weak to 
shake off the influence of the fatal infatuation 
and shut out Laurent from her life, nor yet can 
she accept her heart's choice for better or 
worse, even when experience has left her little 
to learn with regard to Laurent. Clearly both 
friend and lover, out of a novel, would feel 
wronged. Therese's excuse lies in the ex- 
tremely trying character of her companion, 
whose vagaries may be supposed to have driven 
her beside herself at times, just as her airs of 
superiority and mute reproach may have driven 
him not a little mad. Those who wish to know 
in what spirit Madame Sand met the attacks 
upon her provoked by this book, will find her 
reply in a very few words at the conclusion of 
her preface to Jean de la Roche, published the 
same year. 

Most readers of Elle et Lui have been so pre- 



234 GEORGE SAND. 

occupied with the question of the rights and 
wrongs of the originals in their behavior to each 
other, so inclined to judge of the book accord- 
ing to its supposed accuracy or inaccuracy as a 
matter of history, that its force, as a study of 
the attraction that so often leads two excep- 
tional but hopeless, irreconcilable spirits to seek 
in each other a refuge from the isolation in 
which their superiority places them, has been 
somewhat overlooked. Laurent, whether a true 
portrait or not, is only too true to nature ; ex- 
cessive in his admirable powers and in his 
despicable weakness. Therese is an equally 
faithful picture of a woman not quite up to the 
level of her own principles, which are so high 
that any lapse from them on her part brings 
down more disasters on herself and on others 
than the misdemeanors of avowedly unscrupu- 
lous persons. 

Within a few months of Elle et Ltd had 
appeared L Homme de Neige, * a work of totally 
different but equally characteristic cast. The 
author's imagination had still all its old zest 
and activity, and readers for whom fancy has 
any charm will find this Scandinavian romance 
thoroughly enjoyable. The subject of the 
marionette theater, here introduced with such 

* The " Snow Man," translated by Virginia Vaughan. Bos- 
ton : Roberts Brothers. 



PLAYS AND LATER NOVELS. 235 

brilliant and ingenious effect, she had studied 
both historically and practically. She and her 
son found it so fascinating that, years before 
this time, a miniature stage had been con- 
structed by the latter at Nohant, over which he 
presided, and which they and their friends 
found an endless source of amusement. Ma- 
dame Sand wrote little dramas expressly for 
such representations, and would sit up all night, 
making dresses for the puppets. In an agree- 
able little article she has devoted to the subject, 
she describes how from the crudest beginnings 
they succeeded in elaborating their art to a 
high pitch ; the repertoire of their lilliputian 
theater including more than twenty plays, their 
"company" over a hundred marionettes. 

To the next year, i860, belong the pleasant 
tale of artisan life, La Ville Noire, and the 
well-known and popular Marquis de Villemer, 
notable as a decided success in a genre sel- 
dom adopted by her, that of the purely society 
novel. 

Already Madame Sand had outlived the 
period of which she was so brilliant a represent- 
ative. After the Romantic movement had 
spent its force, a reaction had set in that was 
influencing the younger school of writers, and 
that has continued to give the direction to suc- 
cessful talent until the present day. Of the so- 



236 GEORGE SAND. 

called "realism," Madame Sand said that it was 
nothing new. She saw there merely another 
form of the same revolt of nature against affect- 
ation and convention which had prompted the 
Romantic movement, whose disciples had now 
become guilty of affectation in their -turn. 
Madame Bovary she pronounced with truth to 
be but concentrated Balzac. She was ready to 
perceive and do justice to the great ability of 
the author, as to original genius in any school ; 
thus of Tourguenief she speaks with enthu- 
siasm : " Realist to see all, poet to beautify all, 
great heart to pity and understand all." But 
she deplored the increasing tendency among 
artists to give the preference among realities to 
the ugliest and the most painful. Her personal 
leanings avowedly were towards the other 
extreme ; but she was too large-minded not to 
recognize that truth in one form or another 
must always be the prime object of the artist's 
search. The manner of its presentation will 
vary with the age. 

Let the realists, if they like, go on proclaiming that all 
is prose, and the idealists that all is poesy. The last 
will have their rainy days, the first their days of sun- 
shine. In all arts the victory remains with a privileged 
few, who go their own ways ; and the discussions of the 
"schools " will pass away like old fashions. 

On the generation of writers that George 



PLAYS AND LATER NOVELS. 237 

Sand saw growing up, any opinion pronounced 
must be premature. But with regard to herself, 
it should now be possible to regard her work in 
a true perspective. As with Byron, Dickens, 
and other popular celebrities, a phase of infinite 
enthusiasm for her writings was duly succeeded 
by a phase of determined depreciation. The 
public opinion that survives when blind friend- 
ship and blind enmity have done their worst is 
likely to be the judgment of posterity. 



CHAPTER XL 



ARTIST AND MORALIST. 



On what, in the future, will the fame of George 
Sand mainly rest ? According to some critics, 
on her gifts of fertile invention and fluent nar- 
ration alone, which make her novels attractive 
in spite of the chimerical theories, social, politi- 
cal and religious, everywhere interwoven. Ac- 
cording to other judges again, her fictions tran- 
scend and are likely to outlive other fictions by 
virtue of certain eternal philosophic verities 
which they persistently set forth, and which 
give them a serious interest the changes in 
novel-fashions cannot effect. 

The conclusion seems inevitable that whilst 
the artistic strength of George Sand's writings 
is sufficient to command readers among those 
most out of harmony with her views, to minds 
in sympathy with her own these romances, 
because they express and enforce with earnest- 
ness, sincerity and fire, the sentiments of a 
poetic soul, a generous heart, and an immense 
intelligence, on subjects of consequence to 



ARTIST AND MORALIST. 239 

humanity, have a higher value than can attach 
to skillful development of plot and intrigue, 
mere display of literary cleverness, or of the 
storings of minute observation. 

Her opinions themselves have been widely 
misapprehended, perhaps because her person- 
ality — or rather that imaginary personage, the 
George Sand of the myths — has caused a con- 
fusion in people's minds between her ideal 
standard and her individual success in keeping 
up to it. We would not ignore the importance 
of personal example in one so famous as her- 
self. We may pass by eccentricities not invit- 
ing to imitation ; for if any of her sex ever 
thought to raise themselves any nearer to the 
level of George Sand by smoking or wearing 
men's clothes, such puerility does not call for 
notice. Still, the influence she strenuously 
exerted for good as a writer for the public 
would have worked more clearly had she never 
seemed to swerve from the high principles she 
expressed, or been led away by the disturbing 
forces of a nature calm only on the surface. 
Nothing is more baffling than the incomplete 
revelations of a very complex order of mind, 
with its many-sided sympathies and its apparent 
contradictions. The self -justification she puts 
forward for her errors is sometimes sophistical, 
but not for that insincere. She is not trying to 



240 GEORGE SAND. 

make us her dupes ; she is the dupe herself of 
her dangerous eloquence. - But her moral worth 
so infinitely outweighed the alloy as to leave 
but little call, or even warrant, for dwelling on 
the latter. "If I come back to you," said her 
old literary, patron Delatouche, into whose disfa- 
vor she had fallen awhile, when he came years 
after to ask for the restitution of the friendship 
he had slighted, "it is that I cannot help my- 
self, and your qualities surpass your defects." 

To pass from herself to her books, no one has 
made more frank, clear and unchanging confes- 
sion of their heart's faith or their head's princi- 
ples. Her creed was that which has been, and 
ever will be in some guise, the creed of minds 
of a certain order. She did not invent it. 
Poets, moralists, theologians, have proclaimed 
it before her and after her. She found for it a 
fresh mode of expression, one answering to the 
needs of the age to which she belonged. 

It is in the union of rare artistic genius with 
an almost as rare and remarkable power of 
enthusiasm for moral and spiritual truth that 
lies her distinguishing strength. Most of her 
novels — all her best novels — share this char- 
acteristic of seeming to be prompted by the 
double and equal inspiration of an artistic and a 
moral purpose. Wherever one of these pre- 
ponderates greatly, or is wanting altogether, 
the novel falls below her usual standard, 



ARTIST AND MORALIST. 24 1 

For in several qualities reckoned important 
her work is open to criticism. "Plan, or the 
want of it," she acknowledges, with a sort of 
complacency, "has always been my weak -point." 
Thus whilst in many of her compositions, 
especially the shorter novels, the construction 
leaves little to be desired, Consuelo is only one 
among many instances in which all ordinary 
rules of symmetry and proportion are set at 
naught. Sometimes the leading idea assumed 
naturally and easily a perfect form ; if simple, 
as in Andre and her pastorals, it usually did so ; 
but if complex, she troubled herself little over 
the task of symmetrical arrangement. M. Max- 
ime Du Camp reports that she said to him: 
"When I begin a novel I have no plan; it 
arranges itself whilst I write, and becomes what 
it may." This fault shocks less in England, 
where genius is apt to rebel against the restric- 
tions of form, and such irregularity has been 
consecrated, so to speak, by the masterpieces 
of the greatest among our imaginative writers. 
And even the more precise criticism of her 
countrymen has owned that this carelessness 
works by no means entirely to her disadvantage. 
In notions more faultless as literary composi- 
tions the reader, whilst struck with admiration 
for the art with which the whole is put together, 
is apt to lose something of the illusion — the 



242 GEORGE SAND. 

impression of nature and conviction. The 
faults of no writer can be more truly denned as 
the defauts de ses qualites than those of George 
Sand, Shorn of her spontaneity, she would 
indeed be shorn of her strength. We are 
carried along by the pleasant, easy stream of 
her musical eloquence? as by an orator who 
knows so well how to draw our attention that 
we forget to find him too long. Her stories 
may be read rapidly, but to be enjoyed should 
be read through. Dipped into and their parts 
taken without reference to the whole, they can 
afford comparatively but little pleasure. 

In translation no novelist loses more than 
George Sand, — who has so much to lose ! 
The qualities sacrificed, though almost intangi- 
ble, are essential to the force of her charm. 
The cement is taken away and the fabric coheres 
imperfectly; and whilst the beauties of her 
manner are blurred, its blemishes appear 
increased ; the lengthiness, over-emphasis of 
expression, questionable taste of certain pas- 
sages, become more marked. Although never- 
theless many of her tales remain pleasant read- 
ing, they suffer as much as translated poetry, 
and only a very inadequate impression of her 
art as a novelist can be arrived at from any 
rendering of it in a foreign tongue. 

Her dialogue has neither brilliancy nor 



ARTIST AND MORALIST 243 

variety. Her characters characterize them- 
selves by the sentiments they express; their 
manner of expression is somewhat uniform — it 
is the manner of George Sand; and although 
pleasant humor and good-natured fun abound in 
her pages, these owe none of their attractions 
to witty sayings, being curiously bare of a bon 
mot or an epigram. 

But we find there the rarer merits of a poetic 
imagination, a vast comprehension of nature, 
admirable insight into human character and 
power of clear analysis; a whole science of 
sentiment and art of narrative, and a charm of 
narrative style that soothes the nerves like 
music. 

She has given us a long gallery of portraits 
of extraordinary variety. It is true that her 
creations for the most part affect us rather as 
masterly portraits than as living, walking men 
and women. This is probably owing to the 
above-noted sameness of style of dialogue, and 
the absence generally of the dramatic quality in 
her novels. On the other hand they are ex- 
tremely picturesque, in the highest sense, 
abounding in scenes and figures which, without 
inviting to the direct illustration they are too 
vivid to need, are full of suggestions to the 
artist. The description in Teverino of Made- 
leine, the bird-charmer, kneeling at prayer 



244 GEORGE SAND. 

in the rude mountain chapel, or outside on the 
rocks, exercising her natural magic over her 
feathered friends ; in Jeanne, of the shepherd- 
girl discovered asleep on the Druidical stones ; 
the noon-day rest of the rustic fishing-party in 
Valentine — Benedict seated on the felled ash- 
tree that bridges the stream, Athenai's gather- 
ing field-flowers on the banks, Louise flinging 
leaves into the current, Valentine reclining 
dreamily among the tall river-reeds, — are a few 
examples taken at random, which it would be 
easy to multiply ad infinitum. 

Any classification of her works in order of 
time that professes to show a progressive 
change of style, a period of super-excellence or 
of distinct decadence, seems to us somewhat 
fanciful. From Indiana and its immediate 
successors, denounced by so many as fraught 
with peril to the morals of her nation, down to 
Nation (1872), which might certainly carry off 
the prize of virtue in a competition in any coun- 
try, George Sand can never be said to have 
entirely abandoned one " manner " for another, 
or for any length of time to have risen above or 
sunk below a certain level of excellence. Andre > 
extolled by her latest critics as "a delicious 
eclogue of the fields/' was contemporary with 
the bombastic, false Byronism of Jacques ; the 
feeble narrative of La Mare au Diable with the 



ARTIST AND MORALIST 245 

passion-introspection of Lucrezia Floriani. The 
ever-popular Consuelo immediately succeeded 
the feeble Compagnon du Tour de France. La 
Marquise, written in the first year of her 
literary life, shows a power of projection out of 
herself, and of delicate analysis, hardly to be 
surpassed ; but Francia, of forty years' later 
date, is an equally perfect study. From the 
time of Indiana onwards she continued to pro- 
duce at the rate of about two- novels a year; 
and at intervals, rare intervals, the product was 
a failure. But we shall find her when approach- 
ing seventy still writing on, without a trace of 
the weakness of old age. 

The charge of "unreality" so commonly 
brought against her novels it may be well 
briefly to examine. Such little fantasy-pieces 
in Hoffmann's manner as Le Chateau des De'- 
sertes, Teverino, and others, making no pretense 
to be exact studies of nature, cannot fairly be 
censured on this head. Like fairy tales they 
have a place of their own in art. One of the 
prettiest of thes,e is Les Dames Vertes, in which 
the fable seems to lead us over the borders of 
the supernatural ; but the secret of the mystifi- 
cation, well kept till the last, is itself so pleasing 
and original that the reader has no disappoint- 
ing sense as of having had a hoax played upon 
his imagination. . 



246 GEORGE SAND. 

In character drawing no one can, on occasion, 
be a more uncompromising realist than George 
Sand. Andre, Horace, Laurent in Elle et Lui y 
Pauline, Corilla, Alida in Valvedre, might be 
cited as examples. But her theory was unques- 
tionably not the theory which guides the mod- 
ern school of novel writers. She wrote, she 
states explicitly, for those "who desire to find 
in a novel a sort of ideal life." She made this 
her aim, but without depreciation of the widely 
different aims of other authors. " You *paint 
mankind as they are," she said to Balzac ; " I, 
as they ought to be, or might become. You 
write the comedy of humanity. I should like 
to write the eclogue, the poem, the romance of 
humanity." She has been taxed with flattering 
nature and human nature because her love of 
beauty — defined by her as the highest expres- 
sion of truth — dictated her choice of subjects. 
An artist who paints roses paints from reality 
as entirely as he who paints mud. Her princi- 
ple was to choose among realities those which 
seemed best worth painting. 

The amount of idealization in her peasant 
sketches was naturally over-estimated by those 
who, never having studied the class, could not 
conceive of a peasant except conventionally, as 
a drunken boor. The very just portrait of 
Cecilia Boccaferri, the conscientious but obscure 



ARTIST AND MORALIST. 247 

artist in Le Chateau des Desertes, might seem 
over-flattered to such as imagine that all opera- 
singers must be persons of riotous living. The 
types she prefers to present, if exceptional, are 
not impossible or non-existent. An absolutely 
faultless heroine, such as Consuelo, she seldom 
attempts to bring before us ; an ideal hero, 
never. 

Further, even when the idealism is greatest 
the essence is true. Her most fanciful concep- 
tions, most improbable combinations, seem more 
natural than do every-day scenes and characters 
treated by inferior artists. This is only partly 
due to the inimitable little touches of nature 
that renew the impression of reality at every 
page. Her imagination modified her material, 
but only in order the more vividly to illustrate 
truths positive and everlasting. So did Shake- 
speare when he drew Prospero and Miranda, 
Caliban and Ariel. Art, as regarded by George 
Sand, is a search for ideal truth rather than a 
study of positive reality. This principle deter- 
mined the spirit of her romances. She was the 
highest in her genre ; let the world decide 
which genre is the highest. 

When, after the publication of Indiana, Valen- 
tine, Lelia arid Jacques, the moral tendency of 
her works was so sharply attacked, it was con- 
tended on her behalf by some friendly critics 



248 GEORGE SAND. 

that art and social morality have no necessary 
connection — a line of defense she would have 
been the last to take up for herself. In the pres- 
ent day her judges complain rather of her inces- 
sant moralizing, and on the whole with more 
reason. She indignantly denied that her novels 
had the evil tendencies imputed to them. Cer- 
tainly the supposition of the antagonistic spirit 
of her writings to Christianity and marriage 
vanishes in proportion to the reader's acquaint- 
ance with her works. But against certain doc- 
trines and practices of the Roman Catholic 
Church which she believed to be pernicious in 
their influence, she from the first declared war, 
and by her frank audacity made bitter enemies. 
M. Renan relates that when he was a boy of fif- 
teen his ecclesiastical superiors showed him 
George Sand, emblematically portrayed for the 
admonition of the youth under their care, as 
a woman in black trampling on a cross ! Now, 
it is not merely that her own faith was emi- 
nently Christian in character, and that the 
Christian ideal seemed to her the most perfect 
that has yet presented itself to the mind of man ; 
but if unable to accept for herself the doctrine 
of revelation as commonly interpreted, she is 
utterly without the aggressiveness of spirit, the 
petty flippancy, that often betray the intel- 
lectual bigot under the banner of free thought. 



ARTIST AND MORALIST. 249 

She was too large-minded to incline to ridicule 
the serious convictions of earnest seekers for 
truth, and she respected all sincerity of belief — / 
all faith that produced beneficence in action. 

The alleged hostility of her romances to mar- 
riage resumes itself into a declared hostility to 
the conventional French system of match-mak- 
ing. Much that she was condemned for ventur- 
ing to put forward we should simply take for 
granted in England, where — whichever system 
work the best in practice — to the strictest 
Philistine's ideas of propriety there is nothing 
unbecoming in a love-match. The aim and end 
of true love in her stories is always marriage, 
whether it be the simple attachment of Germain, 
the field-laborer, for the rustic maiden of his 
choice, the romantic predilection of the rich 
young widow in Pierre qui roule for the hand- 
some actor Laurence, or the worship of Count 
Albert for the cantatrice Consuelo. Her ideal 
of marriage was, no doubt, a high one, "the 
indissoluble attachment of two hearts fired with 
a like love ; " a love " great) noble, beautiful, 
voluntary, eternal." Among French novelists 
she should rather be noted for the extremely 
small proportion of her numerous romances that 
have domestic infelicity for a theme. 

Her remark that their real offense was that 
they were a great deal too moral for some of 



250 GEORGE SAND. 

their critics, hit home, inasmuch as in her 
attack on the ordinary marriage system of 
France she struck directly at the fashionable 
immorality which is its direct result, and which 
she saw, both in life and in literature, pass free 
of censure. It is the selfish intriguer who 
meets with least mercy in her pages, and who 
is there held up, not only to dislike, but to 
ridicule. 

Persons perplexed by the fact that particular 
novels of hers which, judged by certain theories, 
ought to be morally hurtful, do yet produce a 
very different effect, have accounted for it in 
different ways. One explains it by saying that 
if there is poison on one page there is always 
the antidote on the next. Another observes 
that a certain morality of misfortune is never 
absent from her fictions. In other words, she 
nowhere presents us with the spectacle of real 
happiness reaped at the expense of a violation 
of conscience. And in the rare cases where the 
purpose of the novel seems questionable, she 
defeats her own end. For truth always pre- 
ponderates over error in her conceptions, and 
the result is a moral effect. 
. The want of delicacy that not unfrequently 
disfigures her pages and offends us, offends also 
as an artistic fault. As a fact it is taste rather 
than. conscience that she is thus apt to shock. 



ARTIST AND MORALIST. 25 1 

For the almost passing coarseness of expression 
or thought is nothing more than the overflow, 
the negligent frankness of a rich and active but 
healthy nature, not the deliberate obliquity of a 
corrupt fancy or perverted mind. Such un- 
reserve, unfortunately, has too commonly been 
the transgression of writers of superabundant 
energy. But her sins are against outward de- 
corum rather than against the principles upon 
which the rules of decorum are based. No one 
was better capable of appreciating and indicat- 
ing with fine touches, delicacy and niceties of 
taste and feeling in others. Her sympathy 
with such sensitiveness is a corrective that 
should render harmless what might vitiate taste 
if that qualification were absent. And her 
stories, though including a very few instances 
where the subject chosen seems to most Eng- 
lish minds too repulsive to admit of possible 
redemption, and the frequent incidental intro- 
duction of situations and frank discussion of 
topics inadmissible in English fiction of that 
period — an honorable distinction it seems in 
some danger of losing in the present — can 
hardly be censured from the French standpoint, 
as fair critics now admit. It is inconceivable, 
that a public could be demoralized by Lidiana 
and Valentine, at a time when no subject 
seemed wicked and morbid enough to satisfy 



252 GEORGE SAND. 

popular taste. The art of George Sand in the 
main was sound and healthy, and in flat opposi- 
tion to the excesses both of the ultra-romantic 
and ultra-realist schools. 

Clear-sighted critics, perceiving that the im- 
pression produced by her works is not one to 
induce men and women to defy the laws of their 
country, nor likely to undermine their religious 
faith, have gone more to the heart of the mat- 
ter. The dangerous tendency is more insidious, 
they say, and more general. Virtue, and not 
vice, is made attractive in her books ; but it is 
an easy virtue, attained without self-conquest. 
All her characters, good and bad, act alike from 
impulse. Those who seek virtue seek pleasure 
in so doing, and her philosophy of life seems to 
be that people should do as they like. The 
morality she commends to our sympathy and 
admiration is a morality of instinct and emotion, 
not of reason and principle. Self-renunciation, 
immolation of desire in obedience to accepted 
precept, is ignored. Sentiment is supreme. 
Duty, as a motive power, is set aside. 

George Sand, who as a writer from first to 
last appeared as a crusader against the evil, in- 
justice and vice that darken the world, did 
undoubtedly choose rather to speak out of her 
heart to our hearts, than out of her head to our 
heads, and considered moreover that such was 



ARTIST AND MORALIST. 253 

the more effectual way. Her idea of virtue lay 
not in the curbing of evil instincts, but in their 
conversion or modification by the evoking of 
good impulses, that " guiding and intensifying 
of our emotions by a new ideal " which has 
been called the great work of Christianity. 

It is not — or not in the first place — that 
people should do as they like, but that they 
should like to do right ; and further, that human 
nature in that ideal life the sentiment of which 
pervades her works, and in which she saw " no 
other than the normal life as we are called to 
know it," does not desire what is hurtful to it. 

The goodness that consists in doing right or 
refraining from doing wrong reluctantly, or in 
obedience to prescribed rules, or from mechan- 
ical habit, had for her no life or charm. The 
object to be striven for should be nothing less 
than the "perfect harmony of inward desire and 
outward obligation." 

Virtue should be chosen, though we seem to 
sacrifice happiness ; but that the two are in the 
beginning identical, that, as expressed by Mr. 
Herbert Spencer, "whether perfection of nature, 
virtuousness of action, or rectitude of motive, 
be assigned as the proper aim, the definition of 
perfection, virtue, rectitude, brings us down to 
happiness experienced in some form, at some 
time, by some person as the fundamental idea," 



254 GEORGE SAND. 

is a philosophic truth of which a large aperqu is 
observable in the works of George Sand. Self- 
sacrifice should spring from direct desire, 
altruism be spontaneous — a need — becoming 
a second and better nature ; not won by painful 
effort, but through the larger development of 
the principle of sympathy. Strong in her own 
immense power of sympathy, she applied her- 
self to the task of awakening and extending 
such sympathies in others. This she does by 
the creation of agreeable, interesting and noble 
types, such as may put us out of conceit with 
what is mean and base. Goodness, as under- 
stood and portrayed by her, must recommend 
itself not only to the judgment but to the heart. 
She worked to popularize high sentiments, and 
to give shape ^and reality to vague ideas of 
human excellence. Her idea of virtue as a 
motive, not a restraint, not the controlling of 
low and evil desires, but the precluding of all 
temptations to yield to these, by the calling out 
of stronger, higher desires, so far from being a 
low one, is indeed the very noblest ; yet not on 
that account a chimera to those who hold, like 
her, to the conviction that "what now charac- 
terizes the exceptionally high may be expected 
eventually to characterize all. For that which 
the highest human nature is capable of is within 
the reach of human nature at large." "We 



ARTIST AND MORALIST. 255 

gravitate towards the ideal," she writes, " and 
this gravitation is infinite, as is the ideal itself." 
And her place remains among those few great 
intelligences who can be said to have given 
humanity an appreciable impulse in the direc- 
tion of progress. 



CHAPTER XII. 



LATER YEARS. 



When, in 1869, Madame Sand was applied to 
by M. Louis Ulbach — a literary friend who 
proposed to write her biography — for some 
account of her life from that time onwards 
where her memoirs break off, she replied, in a 
letter now appended to those memoirs, as 
follows : — 

For the last five-and-twenty years there is nothing more 
that is of interest. It is old age, very quiet and very 
happy, en famille, crossed by sorrows entirely personal 
in their nature — deaths, defections, and then the general 
state of affairs in which we have suffered, you and I, from 
the same causes. My time is spent in amusing the 
children, doing a little botany, long walks in summer — I 
am still a first-rate pedestrian — and writing novels, when 
I can secure two hours in the daytime and two in the 
evening. I write easily and with pleasure. This is my 
recreation, for my correspondence is numerous, and there 
lies work indeed ! If one had none but one's friends to 
write to ! But how many requests, some touching, some 
impertinent ! Whenever there is anything I can do, I 
reply. Those for whom I can do nothing I do not 
answer. Some deserve that one should try, even with 



LATER YEARS. 257 

small hope of succeeding. Then one must answer that 
one will try. All this, with private affairs to which one 
must really give attention now and then, makes some ten 
letters a day. 

The old age of George Sand, brighter, fuller 
and more active than the youth of most men 
and women, was in itself a most signal proof of 
the stability and worth of her mental organiza- 
tion. Life, which deteriorates a frail character, 
told with a.perfecting and elevating power upon 
hers. 

Of her earlier personal beauty few traces 
remained after middle age except a depth of 
expression in her eyes, the features having 
become thickened by age. Some among those 
who, like Dickens, first saw her in her later 
years and still looked for the semblance of a 
heroine of romance, failed to find the muse 
Lelia of their imaginations under the guise of a 
middle-aged bonrgeoise. But such impressions 
were superficial. Her portrait in black and 
white by Couture, engraved by Manceau, seems 
to reconcile these apparent discrepancies. 
Beauty is not here, but the face is so powerful 
and comprehensive that we perceive there at 
once the mirror of a mind capable of embracing 
both the prose and the poetry of life; and by 
many this portrait is preferred to the earlier 
likenesses. 



258 GEORGE SAND. 

Nor is there anything more remarkable in 
her correspondence than the extremely inter- 
esting series of letters, extending from Febru- 
ary, 1863, to within three months of her death in 
1876, and addressed to Gustave Flaubert, at 
this period her familiar friend. The intercourse 
of two minds of so different an intellectual and 
moral order as those of the authors of Consuelo 
and of Madame Bovary offers to all a curious 
study. To the admirers of George Sand these 
letters are invaluable, both from a literary point 
of view and as a record of her inner life from 
that time onwards, when, as expressed by her- 
self, she resolutely buried youth, and owned 
herself the gainer by an increasing calm within. 
The secret of her future happiness she found 
in living for her children and her friends. That 
she retained her zest for intellectual pleasures 
she ascribed to the very fact that she never 
allowed herself to be absorbed for long in these 
and in herself. 

"Artists are spoilt children," she writes to 
Flaubert, " and the best of them are great ego- 
ists. You tell me I love them too well ; I love 
them as I love woods and fields, all things, all 
beings that I know a little and make my con- 
stant study. In the midst of it all I pursue my 
calling ; and how I love that calling of mine, 
and all that nourishes and renovates it ! " 



LATER YEARS. 259 

We must now take up the thread of outward 
events again, which we have slightly antici- 
pated. 

In the autumn of i860 Madame Sand had a 
severe attack of typhoid fever. She was then 
on the point of beginning her little tale, La 
Famille de Germandre ; " le roman de majievre" 
she playfully terms it afterwards, when retrac- 
ing {he circumstances in a letter to her old 
friend Francois Rollinat : — 

The day before that upon which I was suddenly taken 
very seriously ill, I had felt quite well. I had scribbled 
the beginning of a novel ; I had placed all my personages ; 
I knew them thoroughly; I knew their situations in the 
world, their characters, tendencies, ideas, relations to 
each other. I saw their faces. All that remained to be 
known was what they were going to do, and I did not 
trouble my head about that, having time to think it over 
to-morrow. 

Struck down on the morrow, she was for 
many days in a precarious condition ; and in 
the confused fancies of fever found herself 
wandering with La Famille de Germandre about 
the country, alighting in ruined castles, and 
encountering the most whimsical adventures in 
flood and field. 

It would have been an easy death, she 
remarked afterwards, had she died then, as she 
might, in her dream ; but she came to herself 



260 GEORGE SAND. 

to find her son and friends in such anxiety on 
her account, so overjoyed at her convalescence, 
that she could not but be glad of the life that 
was given back to her. Early in 1861 we find her 
recruiting her forces by a stay at Tamaris, near 
Toulon, completing the novel interrupted by 
illness; resuming her long walks and botanic 
studies, and thoroughly enjoying the sense of 
returning vital powers. 

She stood always in great dread of the idea 
of possibly losing her activity as she advanced 
in years. The infirmities of old age, however, 
she was happily to be spared, preserving her 
energy and mental faculties, as will be seen, till 
just before her death. But though she was 
restored to health and strength, this illness 
seems to have left its traces on her constitu- 
tion. 

Her son's marriage to Mdlle. Calamatta, 
spoken of by Madame Sand as a heart's desire 
of hers at length fulfilled, took place in 1862, 
not many months after his return from half a 
year of travel in Africa and America, in the 
company of Prince Napoleon. The event proved 
a fresh source of the purest happiness to her, 
and was not to separate her from her son. The 
young people settled at Nohant, which remained 
her headquarters. There a few years later we 
find her residing almost exclusively, except 



LATER YEARS. 26 1 

when called by matters of business to her pie 'd- 
d-terre in Paris, where she never lingered long. 
To the two little grand-daughters, Aurore and 
Gabrielle, whom she saw spring up in her 
home, she became passionately devoted. Most 
of her compositions henceforward are dated from 
Nohant, where, indeed, more than fifty years of 
her life were spent. 

As regards decorum of expression and tem- 
perance of sentiments, the later novels of 
George Sand have earned more praise than 
censure; but some readers may feel that in 
fundamental questions of taste the comparison 
between them and their forerunners is not 
always entirely to their advantage. The fer- 
vor of youth has a certain purifying power to 
redeem from offense matter, even though over- 
frankly treated, which becomes disagreeable in 
cold analysis, however sober the wording, and 
clear and admirable the moral pointed. 

Mademoiselle La Quintinie t which appeared 
in 1863, was suggested by M. Octave Feuillet's 
Sibille. The point of M. Feuillet's novel is, 
that Sibille, an ardent Catholic, stifles her love, 
and renounces her lover on account of his 
heterodox opinions. Madame Sand gives us 
the reverse — a heroine who is reflectively 
rather than mystically inclined, and whose 
lover by degrees succeeds in effecting her con- 



262 GEORGE SAND. 

version to his more liberal views. Here, as 
elsewhere, the author's mind shows a sym- 
pathetic comprehension of the standpoint of 
enlightened Protestantism curiously rare among 
those who, like herself, have renounced Roman- 
ism for the pursuit of free thought and specula- 
tion. But even those who prefer the denote- 
ment of George Sand's novel to that of M. 
Feuillet's will not rank Mademoiselle La Quin- 
tinie very high among the author's productions. 
It is colorless, and artistically weak, however 
controversially strong. 

Madame Sand, according to her own reckon- 
ing in 1 869, had made at least ,£40,000 by her 
writings. Oftt„of this she had saved no fortune. 
She had always preferred to live from day to 
day on the proceeds of her work, regulating her 
expenses accordingly, trusting her brain to 
answer to any emergency and bring her out of 
the periodical financial crises in which the un- 
certainty of literary gains and the liberality of 
her expenditure involved her. She continued 
fond of travelling, especially of exploring the 
nooks and corners of France, felt by her to be 
less well known than they deserve, and fully as 
picturesque as the spots tourists go far to visit. 
Here she sought fresh frames for her novels. 
" If I have only three words to say about a 
place," she tells us, " I like to be able to refer 



LATER YEARS. 263 

to it in my memory so as to make as few mis- 
takes as possible." 

In January, 1869, we find her writing of her- 
self in a playful strain to her friend Flau- 
bert : — 

The individual called George Sand is quite well, enjoy- 
ing the marvelous winter now reigning in Berry, gather- 
ing flowers, taking note of interesting botanic anomalies, 
stitching at dresses and mantles for her daughter-in-law, 
costumes for the^marionettes, dressing dolls, reading 
music, but, above all, spending hours with little Aurore, 
who is a wonderful child. There is not a being on earth 
more tranquil and happier in his home than this old 
troubadour retired from business, now and then singing 
his little song to the moon, singing well or ill he does 
not particularly care, so long as he gives the motif that 

is running in his head He is happy, for he 

is at peace, and can find amusement in everything. 

M. Plauchut, another literary friend and a 
visitor at Nohant during this last decade of her 
lifetime, gives a picture of the order of her day • 
it is simplicity itself. 

Nine o'clock, in summer and in winter alike, 
was her hour of waking. Letters and news- 
papers would then occupy her until noon, when 
she came down to join the family dejetiner. 
Afterwards she would stroll for an hour in the 
garden and the wood, visiting and tending her 
favorite plants and flowers. At two o'clock she 
would come indoors to give a lesson to her grand- 



264 GEORGE SAND. 

children in the library, or work there on her 
own account, undistracted by the romps around 
her. Dinner at six was followed by a short 
evening walk, after which she played with the 
children, or set them dancing indoors. She 
liked to sit at the piano, playing over to herself 
bits of music by her favorite Mozart, or old 
Spanish and Berrichon airs. After a game of 
dominoes or cards she would still sit up so late, 
occupying herself with water-color painting or 
otherwise, that sometimes her son was obliged 
to take away the lights. These long evenings, 
the same writer bears witness, sometimes afford- 
ed rare opportunities of hearing Madam Sand 
talk of the events and the men of her 'time. 
In the absolute quiet of the country, among a 
small circle of responsive minds, she, so silent 
otherwise, became expansive. " Those who 
have never heard George Sand at such hours," 
he concludes, "have never known her. She 
spoke well, with great elevation of ideas, charm- 
ing eloquence, and a spirit of infinite indul- 
gence." When at length she retired, it was to 
write on until the morning hours according to 
her old habit, only relinquished when her health 
made this imperative. 

She had allowed her son and her daughter-in- 
law to take the cares of household management 
off her hands. This left her free, as she ex- 



LATER YEARS. 26$ 

pressed it, to be a child again, to hold aloof 
from things immediate and transitory, reserving 
her thoughts and contemplations for what is 
general and eternal. She found a poet's 
pleasure in abstracting herself from human life, 
saying: "There are hours when I escape from 
myself, when I live in a plant, when I feel my- 
self grass, a bird, a tree-top, a cloud, a running 
stream." Shaking off, as it were, the sense of 
personality, she felt more freely and fully the 
sense of kinship with the life and soul of the 
universe. 

It was her habit every evening to sum up in 
a few lines the impressions of the day, and this 
journal, for the conspicuous absence of incident 
in its pages, she compares to the log-book of a 
ship lying at anchor. But one terrible and 
little anticipated break in its tranquil monotony 
was yet to come. 

George Sand lived to see her country pass 
through every imaginable political experience. 
Born before the First Republic had expired, she 
had witnessed the First Empire, the restored 
Monarchy, the Revolution of 1830, the reign of 
Louis Philippe, the convulsions of 1848, the 
presidency of Louis Bonaparte, and the Second 
Empire. She was still to see and outlive its 
fall, the Franco-German War, the Commune, 
and to die, as she was born, under a republic. 



266 GEORGE SAND. 

To some of her friends who had reproached 
her with showing too much indulgence for the 
state of things under Imperial rule, she replied 
that the only change in her was that she had 
acquired more patience in proportion as more 
was required. The regime she condemned — 
and amid apparent prosperity had foretold the 
corrupting influence on the nation of the estab- 
lished ideal of frivolity, and that a crash of 
some kind must ensue. Her judgment on the 
Emperor, after his fall, is worth noting, if only 
because it is dispassionate. Since his elevation 
to the Imperial dignity she had lost all old 
illusions as to his public intentions. With 
regard to these, on the occasion of her inter- 
views with him at the Elysee, he had com- 
pletely deceived her, and designedly, she had at 
first thought. Nor had she concealed her 
disgust. 

I left Paris, and did not come to an appointment he 
had offered me. They did not tell me " The King might 
have had to wait!" but they wrote "The Emperor 
waited." However, I continued to write to him, when- 
ever I saw hopes of saving some victim, to ponder his 
answers and watch his actions ; and I became convinced 
that he did not intentionally impose upon any one. He 
imposed on himself and on everybody else ... In pri- 
vate life he had genuine qualities. I happened to see in 
him a side that was really generous and sincere. His 
dream of grandeur for France was not that of a sound 



LATER YEARS. 267 

mind, but neither of an ordinary mind. Really France 
would have sunk too low if she had submitted for twenty 
years to the supremacy of a cretin, working only for him- 
self. One would then have to give her up in despair for 
ever and ever. The truth is that she mistook a meteor 
for a star, a silent dreamer for a man of depth. Then 
seeing him sink under disasters he ought to have fore- 
seen, she took him for a coward. 



George Sand's Journal d'un Voyageur pendant 
la guerre has a peculiar and painful interest. It 
is merely a note-book of passing impressions 
from September, 1870, to January, 1871 ; but 
its pages give a most striking picture of those 
effects of war which have no place in military 
annals. 

The army disasters of the autumn were pre- 
ceded by natural calamities of great severity. 
The heat of the summer in Berry had been 
tremendous, and Madame Sand describes the 
havoc as unprecedented in her experience — 
the flowers and grass killed, the leaves scorched 
and yellowed, the baked earth under foot literally 
cracking in many places ; no water, no hay, no 
harvest, but destructive cattle-plague, forest- 
fires driving scared wolves to seek refuge in the 
courtyard of Nohant itself — the remnant of 
corn spared by the sun, ruined by hail-storms. 
She and all her family had suffered from the 
unhealthiness of the season. Thus the political 



268 GEORGE SAND. 

catastrophe found her already weakened by 
anxiety and fatigue, and feeling greatly the 
effort to set to work again. Finally, an out- 
break of malignant small-pox in the village 
forced her to take her little grandchildren and 
their mother from Nohant out of reach of the 
infection. September and October were passed 
at or in the neighborhood of Boussac, a small 
town some thirty miles off. Sedan was over, 
and the worst had begun ; the protracted sus- 
pense, the long agony of hope. 

Those suffered most perhaps who, like her- 
self, had to wait in enforced inaction, amid the 
awful dead calm that reigned in the provinces, 
yet forbidden to forget their affliction for a 
moment. The peasant was gone from the land — 
only the old and infirm were left to look 
after the flocks, to till and sow the field. Ma- 
dame Sand notes, and with a kind of envy, the 
stolid patience and industry, the inextinguisha- 
ble confidence, of poor old Jacques Bonhomme 
when things are at the worst. " He knows 
that in one way or another it is he who will 
have to pay the expenses of the war ; he knows 
next winter will be a season of misery and 
want, but he believes in the spring" — in the 
bounty of nature to repair war's ravages. 

During this time of unimaginable trouble 
some of the strongest minds were unhinged. 



LATER YEARS. 269 

It is no small honor to George Sand that hers 
should have preserved its balance. The pages 
of this journal are distinguished throughout by 
a wonderful calm of judgment and an equitable 
tone — not the calm of indifference, but of a 
broad and penetrating intelligence, no longer 
to be blinded by the wild excitement and pas- 
sions of the moment, or exalted by childish 
hopes one hour to be thrust into the madness 
of despair the next. 

Although tempted now and then to regret 
that she had recovered from her illness ten 
years ago, surviving but to witness the abase- 
ment of France, she was not, like others, panic- 
struck at the prospect of invasion, as though 
this meant the end of their country. " It will 
pass like a squall over a lake," she said. 

But it was a time when they could be sure of 
nothing except of their distress. The telegraph 
wires were cut ; rumors of good news they 
feared to believe would be succeeded by tales of 
horror they feared to discredit. Tidings would 
come that three hundred thousand of the enemy 
had been disposed of in a single engagement 
and King William taken prisoner ; then of 
fatal catastrophes befallen to private friends — 
stories which often proved equally unfounded. 

She had friends shut up in Paris of whom 
she knew not whether they were alive or dead. 



270 GEORGE SAND. 

The strain of anxiety and painful excitement 
made sleep impossible to her except in the last 
extremity of fatigue. Yet she had her little 
grandchildren to care for ; and when they came 
around her, clamoring for the fairy tales she 
was used to supply, she contented them as well 
as she could and gave them their lessons as 
usual, anxious to keep them from realizing the 
sadness the causes of which they were too 
young to understand. 

It was the first time that she had known a 
distress that forbade her to find a solace in 
nature. She describes how one day, walking 
out with some friends and following the course 
of the river Tarde, she had half abandoned her- 
self to the enjoyment of the scene — the cas- 
cade, the dragon-flies skimming the surface, 
the purple scabious flowers, the goats clamber- 
ing on the boulders of rock that strewed the 
borders and bed of the stream — when one of 
the party remarks : " Here's a retreat pretty 
well fortified against the Prussians." 

And the present, forgotten for an instant in 
reverie, came back upon her with a shock. 

Letters in that district took three or four 
days to travel thirty miles. Newspapers were 
rarely to be procured ; and when procured, 
made up of contradictions, wild suggestions, 
and the pretentious speeches of national lead- 



LATER YEARS. ■ 2J\ 

ers, meant to be reassuring, but marked by a 
vagueness and violence from which Madame 
Sand rightly augured ill. 

The red-letter days were those that brought 
communications from their friends in Paris by 
the aerial post. On October n, two balloons, 
respectively called " George Sand " and the 
"Armand Barbes," left the capital. "My 
name," she remarks, " did not bring good luck 
to the first — which suffered injuries and de- 
scended with difficulty, yet rescued the Ameri- 
cans who had gone up in it." The "Barbes" 
had a smoother but a more famous flight ; alight- 
ing and depositing M. Gambetta safely at 
Tours. 

As the autumn advanced Madame Sand and 
her family were enabled to return to Nohant. 
But what a return was that ! The enemy were 
quartered within forty miles, at Issoudun ; the 
fugitives thence were continually seen passing, 
carrying off their children, their furniture and 
their merchandise to places of security. Al- 
ready the enemy's guns were said to- have been 
heard at La Chatre. Madame Sand walked in 
her garden daily among her marigolds, snap- 
dragon and ranunculus, making curious specula- 
tions as to what might be in store for herself 
and her possessions. She remarks : — 

You get accustomed to it, even though you have not 
the consolation of being able to offer the slightest resist- 



272 GEORGE SAND. 

ance. ... I look at my garden, I dine, I play with 
the children, whilst waiting in expectation of seeing the 
trees felled roots upwards ; of getting no more bread to 
eat, and of having to carry my grandchildren off on my 
shoulders ; for the horses have all been requisitioned. I 
work, expecting my scrawls to light the pipes of the 
Prussians. 

But the enemy, though so near, never passed 
the boundaries of the "Black Valley." The de- 
partment of the Indre remained uninvaded, 
though compassed on all sides by the foreign 
army ; and George Sand was able to say after- 
wards that she at least had never seen a Prus- 
sian soldier. 

A sad Christmas was passed. On the last 
night of 1870 a meeting of friends at Nohant 
broke up with the parting words, "All is lost !" 

"The execrable year is out," writes Madame 
Sand, " but to all appearances we are entering 
upon a worse." 

On the 15 th of January, 1 871, her little drama 
Franqois le Ckampi, first represented in the 
troublous months of 1849, was acted in Paris 
for the benefit of an ambulance. She notes the 
singular fate of this piece to be reproduced in 
time of bombardment. A pastoral ! 

The worst strain of suspense ended January 
29, with the capitulation of Paris. Here the 
Journal (Tun Voyageur breaks off. It would be 
sad indeed had her life, like that of more than 



LATER YEARS. 273 

one of her compeers, closed then over France in 
mourning. Although it was impossible but that 
such an ordeal must have impaired her strength, 
she outlived the war's ending, and the horrible 
social crisis which she had foreseen must suc- 
ceed the political one. Happier than Prosper 
Merimee, than Alexandre Dumas, and others, 
she saw the dawn of a new era of prosperity for 
her country, whose vital forces, as she had also 
foretold, were to prevail in the end over succes- 
sive ills — the enervation of corruption, of mili- 
tary disaster, and the " orgie of pretended 
renovators ' J at home, that signalized the first 
months of peace abroad. 

In January, 1 872, we again find her writing 
cheerily to Flaubert : — 

Mustn't be ill, mustn't be cross, my old troubadour. 
Say that France is mad, humanity stupid, and that we 
are unfinished animals every one of us, you must love on 
all the same, yourself, your race, above all, your friends. 
I have my sad hours. I look at my blossoms, those two 
little girls smiling as ever, their charming mother, and 
my good, hard-working son, whom the end of the world 
will find hunting, cataloguing, doing his daily task, and 
yet as merry as Punch in his rare leisure moments. 

In a later letter she writes in a more serious 
strain : — 

I do not say that humanity is on the road to the heights ; 
I believe it in spite of all, but I do not argue about it, 



274 GEORGE SAND. 

which is useless, for every one judges according to his 
own eyesight, and the general outlook at the present 
moment is ugly and poor. Besides, I do not need to be 
assured of the salvation of our planet and its inhabitants 
in order to believe in the necessity of the good and the 
beautiful ; if our planet departs from this law it will per- 
ish ; if its inhabitants discard it they will be destroyed. 
As for me, I wish to hold firm till my last breath, not with 
the certainty or the demand to find a " good place" else- 
where, but because my sole pleasure is to maintain myself 
and mine in the upward way. 

The last five years of her life saw her pen in 
full activity. In the Revue des Deux Mondes y 
Malgretout, the novel of 1870, was succeeded by 
Flamarande and Les Deux Freres — composi- 
tions executed with unflagging energy and ani- 
mation of style ; La Tour de Percemont, and a 
series of graceful fairy-stories entitled Contes 
d'une grand' mere. Nanon (1872), a rustic ro- 
mance of the First Revolution, is a highly 
remarkable little work, possibly suggested by 
her recent experiences of the effect of public 
disturbances on remote country places. 

She was also a constant contributor to the* 
newspaper Le Temps. A critical notice by her 
hand of M. Renan's Dialogues et Fragments 
PkilosophiqueSy reprinted from those columns, 
bears date May, 1876, immediately before she 
succumbed to the illness which in a few days 
was to cut short her life. 






LATER YEARS. 275 

At the beginning of this year she had written 
on this subject to Flaubert, in the brave spirit 
she would fain impart to her weaker breth- 
ren : — 

Life is perhaps eternal, and work in consequence eter- 
nal. If so, let us finish our march bravely. If otherwise, 
if the individual perish utterly, let us have the honor of 
having done our task. That is duty, for our only obvious 
duties are to ourselves and our fellow-creatures. What 
we destroy in ourselves we destroy in theni. Our abase- 
ment abases them; our falls drag them down ; we owe to 
them to stand fast, to save them from falling. The 
desire to die early is a weakness, as is the desire to live 
long. 

George Sand, like most persons of an excep- 
tional constitution, had little faith in the efficacy 
for herself of medical science. She was per- 
suaded that the prescribed remedies did her 
more harm than good, and on more than one 
occasion, when her health had caused her chil- 
dren uneasiness, they had had to resort to an 
affectionate ruse to induce her to take advice. 
Her habit of disregarding physical ailments, 
fighting against them as a weakness, and work- 
ing on in their despite, led her to neglect for 
too long failing health that should have been 
attended to. During the whole of May, 1876, 
Madame Sand, though suffering from real ill- 
ness, continued to join in the household routine 



2y6 GEORGE SAND. 

and to proceed with her literary work as usual. 
Not till the last days of the month did she, 
unable any longer to make light of her danger, 
at length consent to send for professional 
advice. It was then too late. She was suffer- 
ing from internal paralysis. The medical atten- 
tion which, sought earlier, might, in the opinion 
of the doctors, have prolonged her life for years, 
could now do nothing to avert the imminent 
fatal consequences of her illness. " It is death," 
she said ; " I did not ask for it, but neither do 
I regret it." For beyond the sorrow of parting 
it had no particular terrors for her ; she had 
viewed and could meet it in another spirit. 
"Death is no more," she had written; "it is 
life renewed and purified." 

She lingered for a week, in great suffering, 
but bearing all with fortitude and an unflinching 
determination not to distress those around her 
by painful complaining. Up to her last hour 
she preserved consciousness and lucidity. The 
words, " JVe touches pas a la verdure" among 
the last that fell from her lips, were understood 
by her children, who knew her wish that the 
trees should be undisturbed under which, in the 
village cemetery, she was soon to find a resting- 
place — a wish that had been sacredly respected. 

Her suffering ceased a short while before 
death, which came to her so quietly that the 



LATER YEARS. 277 

transition was almost imperceptible to the 
watchers by her side. It was on the morning 
of the 8th of June. She was within a month 
of completing her seventy-second year. Al- 
though her life's work had long since been 
mainly accomplished, yet the extinction of that 
great intelligence was felt by many — as fitly 
expressed by M. Renan — " like a diminution of 
humanity." 

Two days later she was buried in the little 
cemetery of Nohant, that adjoins her own 
garden wall. The funeral was conducted with 
extreme simplicity, in accordance with her taste 
and spirit. The scene was none the less a 
memorable one. The rain fell in torrents, but 
no one seemed to regard it ; the country-people 
flocking in from miles around, old men standing 
bare-headed for hours, heedless of the deluge. 
The peasant and the prince, Parisian leaders of 
the world of thought and letters, and the hum- 
blest and most unlearned of her poorer neigh- 
bors, stood together over her grave. 

Six peasants carried the bier from the house 
to the church, a few paces distant. The village 
priest came, preceded by three chorister-boys 
and the venerable singing-clerk of the parish, to 
perform the ceremony. A portion of the little 
churchyard, railed off from the rest and planted 
with evergreen-trees, contains the graves of her 



278 GEORGE SAND. 

grandmother, her father, and the two little 
grandchildren she had lost. A plain granite 
tomb in their midst now marks the spot where 
George Sand was laid, literally buried in 
flowers. 

A great spirit was gone from the world ; and 
a good spirit, it will be generally acknowledged : 
an artist in whose work the genuine desire to 
leave those she worked for better than she 
found them, is one inspiring motive. Such 
endeavor may seem to fail, and she affirmed : 
" A hundred times it does fail in its immediate 
results. But it helps, notwithstanding, to pre- 
serve that tradition of good desires and of good 
deeds, without which all would perish." 



GEORGE SAND 

J 

By JUSTIN M'CARTHY. 



Reprinted from " The Galaxy" for May, 1870. 



"\^7"E are all of us probably inclined, now and then, to 
waste a little time in vaguely speculating on what 
might have happened if this or that particular event had 
not given a special direction to the career of some great 
man or woman. If there had been an inch of difference 
in the size of Cleopatra's nose ; if Hannibal had not lin- 
gered at Capua ; if Cromwell had carried out his idea of 
emigration ; if Napoleon Bonaparte had taken service 
under the Turk, — and so on through all the old familiar 
illustrations dear to the minor essayist and the debating 
society. I have sometimes felt tempted thus to lose my- 
self in speculating on what might have happened if the 
woman whom all the world knows as George Sand had 
been happily married in her youth to the husband of her 
choice. Would she ever have taken to literature at all? 
Would she, loving as she does, and as Frenchwomen so 
rarely do, the changing face of inanimate nature, — the 
fields, the flowers and the brooks, — have lived a peace- 



2 GEORGE SAND. 

ful and obscure life in some happy country place, and 
been content with home, and family, and love, and never 
thought of fame ? Or if, thus happily married, she still 
had allowed her genius to find an expression in liter- 
ature, would she have written books with no passionate 
purpose in them, — books which might have seemed 
like those of a good Miss Mulock made perfect, — books 
which Podsnap might have read with approval, and put 
without a scruple into the hands of that modest young 
person, his daughter? Certainly one cannot but think 
that a different kind of early life would have given a 
quite different complexion to the literary individuality of 
George Sand. 

Bulwer Lytton, in one of his novels, insists that true 
genius is always quite independent of the individual suf- 
ferings or joys of its possessor, and describes some 
inspired youth in the novel as sitting down, while sorrow 
is in his heart, and hunger gnawing at his vitals, to 
throw off a sparkling and gladsome little fairy tale. 
Now this is undoubtedly true, in general, of any high 
order of genius ; but there are at least some great and 
striking exceptions. Rousseau and Byron are, in modern 
days, remarkable illustrations of genius, admittedly of a 
very high rank, governed and guided almost wholly by 
the individual fortunes of the men themselves. So, too, 
must we speak of the genius of George Sand. Not 
Rousseau, not even Byron, was in this sense more ego- 
tistic than the woman who broke the chains of her ill- 
assorted marriage with a crash that made its echoes 
heard at last in every civilized country in the world. 
Just as people are constantly quoting nous avons change 
tout cela who never read a page of Moliere, or pour en- 
courager les autres without even being aware that there 



GEORGE SAND. 3 

is a story of Voltaire's called " Candide," so there have 
been thousands of passionate protests uttered in America 
and Europe, for the last twenty years, by people who 
never saw a volume of George Sand, and yet are only 
echoing her sentiments and even repeating her words. 

In a former number of The Galaxy, I expressed 
casually the opinion that George Sand is probably the 
most influential writer of our day. I am still, and delib- 
erately, of the same opinion. It must be remembered 
that very few English or American authors have any 
wide or deep influence over peoples who do not speak 
English. Even of the very greatest authors this is true. 
Compare, for example, the literary dominion of Shake- 
speare with that of Cervantes. All nations who read 
Shakespeare read Cervantes : in Stratford-upon-Avon 
itself Don Quixote is probably as familiar a figure in 
people's minds as FalstafF; but Shakespeare is little 
known indeed to the vast majority of readers in the 
country of Cervantes, in the land of Dante, or in that 
of Racine and Victor Hugo. In something of the same 
way we may compare the influence of George Sand with 
that of even the greatest living authors of England and 
America. What influence has Charles Dickens or 
George Eliot outside the range of the English tongue? 
But George Sand's genius has been felt as a power in 
every country of the world where people read any man- 
ner of books. It has been felt almost as Rousseau's 
once was felt ; it has aroused anger, terror, pity, or 
wild and rapturous excitement and admiration ; it has 
rallied around it every instinct in man or woman which 
is revolutionary ; it has ranged against it all that is con- 
servative. It is not so much a literary influence as a 
great disorganizing force, riving the rocks of custom, 



4 GEORGE SAND. 

resolving into their original elements the social combi- 
nation which tradition and convention would declare to be 
indissoluble. I am not now speaking merely of the sen- 
timents which George Sand does or did entertain on the 
subject of marriage. Divested of all startling effects 
and thrilling dramatic illustrations, these sentiments 
probably amounted to nothing more dreadful than the 
belief that an unwedded union between two people who 
love and are true to each other is less immoral than the 
legal marriage of two uncongenial creatures who do not 
love and probably are not true to each other. But the 
grand, revolutionary idea which George Sand announced 
was that of the social independence and equality of 
woman, — the principle that woman is not made for man 
in any other sense than as man is made for woman. 
For the first time in the history of the world woman 
spoke out for herself with a voice as powerful as that of 
man. For the first time in the history of the world 
woman spoke out as woman, not as the servant, the 
satellite, the pupil, the plaything, or the goddess of man. 
Now, I intend at present to write of George Sand 
rather as an individual, or an influence, than as the 
author of certain works of fiction. Criticism would now 
be superfluously bestowed on the literary merits and 
peculiarities of the great woman whose astonishing intel- 
lectual activity has never ceased to produce, during the 
last thirty years, works which take already a classical 
place in French literature. If any reputation of our day 
may be looked upon as established, we may thus regard 
the reputation of George Sand. She is, beyond com- 
parison, the greatest living novelist of France. She has 
won this position by the most legitimate application of 
the gifts of an artist. With all her marvellous fecundity, 



GEORGE SAND. 5 

she has hardly ever given to the world any work which 
does not seem, at least, to have been the subject of the 
most elaborate and patient care. The greatest tempta- 
tion which tries a story-teller is perhaps the temptation 
to rely on the attractiveness of story-telling, and to pay 
little or no attention to style. Walter Scott's prose, for 
example, if regarded as mere prose, is rambling, irreg- 
ular, and almost worthless. Dickens's prose is as bad a 
model for imitation as a musical performance which is 
out of tune. Of course, I need hardly say that attention 
to style is almost as characteristic of French authors in 
general, as the lack of it is characteristic of English 
authors ; but, even in France, the prose of George Sand 
stands out conspicuous for its wonderful expressiveness 
and force, its almost perfect beauty. Then, of all 
modern French authors, — I might, perhaps, say of all 
modern novelists of any country, — George Sand has 
added to fiction, has annexed from the worlds of reality 
and of imagination the greatest number of original char- 
acters, — of what Emerson calls new organic creations. 
Moreover, George Sand is, after Rousseau, the one only 
great French author who has looked directly and lov- 
ingly into the face of Nature, and learned the secrets 
which skies and waters, fields and lanes, can teach to 
the heart that loves them. Gifts such as these have won 
her the almost unrivalled place which she holds in living 
literature ; and she has conquered at last even the public 
opinion which once detested and proscribed her. I 
could therefore hope to add nothing to what has been 
already said by criticism in regard to her merits as a 
novelist. Indeed, I think it probable that the majority 
of readers in this country know more of George Sand 
through the interpretation of the critics than through the 



6 GEORGE SAND. 

pages of her books. And in her case criticism is so 
nearly unanimous as to her literary merits, that I may 
safely assume the public in general to have in their 
minds a just recognition of her position as a novelist. 
My object is rather to say something about the place 
which George Sand has taken as a social revolutionist, 
about the influence she has so long exercised over the 
world, and about the woman herself. For she is assur- 
edly the greatest champion of woman's rights, in one 
sense, that the world has ever seen ; and she is, on the 
other hand, the one woman out of all the world who has 
been most commonly pointed to as the appalling example 
to scare doubtful and fluttering womanhood back into its 
sheepfold of submissiveness and conventionality. There 
is hardly a woman's heart anywhere in the civilized 
world which has not felt the vibration of George Sand's 
thrilling voice. Women who never saw one of her 
books, — nay, who never heard even her nam de plume, 
have been stirred by emotions of doubt or fear, or repin- 
ing or ambition,, which they never would have known 
but for George Sand, and perhaps but for George Sand's 
uncongenial marriage. For, indeed, there is not now, 
and has not been for twenty years, I venture to think, a 
single " revolutionary " idea, as slow and steady-going 
people would call it, afloat anywhere in Europe or Amer- 
ica, on the subject of woman's relations to man, society, 
and destiny, which is not due immediately to the influence 
of George Sand, and to the influence of George Sand's 
unhappy marriage upon George Sand herself. 

The world has of late years grown used to this extra- 
ordinary woman, and has lost much of the wonder and 
terror with which it once regarded her. I can quite 
remember, — younger people than I can remember,— 



GEORGE SAND. 7 

the time when all good and proper personages in Eng- 
land regarded the authoress of "Indiana" as a sort of 
feminine fiend, endowed with a hideous power for the 
destruction of souls, and an inextinguishable thirst for 
the slaughter of virtuous beliefs. I fancy a good deal 
of this sentiment was due to the fearful reports wafted 
across the seas, that this terrible woman had not merely 
repudiated the marriage bond, but had actually put off 
the garments sacred to womanhood. That George Sand 
appeared in men's clothes was an outrage upon conse- 
crated proprieties far more astonishing than any theo- 
retical onslaught upon old opinions could be. Reformers, 
indeed, should always, if they are wise in their gener- 
ation, have a care of the proprieties. Many worthy peo- 
ple can listen with comparative fortitude when sacred 
and eternal truths are assailed, who are stricken with 
horror when the ark of propriety is never so lightly 
touched. George Sand's pantaloons were, therefore, 
regarded as the most appalling illustration of George 
Sand's wickedness. I well remember what excitement, 
scandal, and horror were created in the provincial town 
where I lived, some twenty years ago, when the editor 
of a local Panjandrum (to borrow Mr. Trollope's word) 
insulted the feelings and the morals of his constituents 
and subscribers by polluting his pages with a translation 
from one of George Sand's shorter novels. Ah me ! the 
little novel might, so far as morality was concerned, 
have been written every word by Miss Phelps, or the 
authoress of the " Heir of Redcliff " ; it had not a word, 
from beginning to end, which might not have been read 
out to a Sunday-school of girls ; the translation was 
made by a woman of the purest soul, and, in her own 
locality, of the highest name ; and yet how virtue did 



8 GEORGE SAND. 

shriek out against the publication ! The editor perse- 
vered in the publishing of the novel, spurred on to bold- 
ness by some of his very young and therefore fearless 
coadjutors, who thought it delightful to confront public 
opinion, and liked the notion of the stars in their courses 
fighting against Sisera, and Sisera not being dismayed. 
That charming, tender, touching little story ! I would 
submit it to-day cheerfully to the verdict of a jury of 
matrons, confident that it would be declared a fit and 
proper publication. But at that time it was enough that 
the story bore the odious name of George Sand ; public 
opinion condemned it, and sent the magazine which ven- 
tured to translate it to an early and dishonored grave. I 
remember reading, about that time, a short notice of 
George Sand by an English authoress of some talent 
and culture, in which the Frenchwoman's novels were 
described as so abominably filthy that even the denizens 
of the Paris brothels were ashamed to be caught read- 
ing them. Now, this declaration was made all in good 
faith, in the simple good faith of that class of persons 
who will pass wholesale and emphatic judgment upon 
w r orks of which they have never read a single page. 
For I need hardly tell any intelligent person of to-day 
that, whatever may be said of George Sand's doctrines, 
she is no more open to the charge of indelicacy than the 
authoress of " Romola." I cannot, myself, remember 
any passage in George Sand's novels which can be called 
indelicate ; and, indeed, her severest and- most hostile 
critics are fond of saying, not without a certain justice, 
that one of the worst, characteristics of her works is the 
delicacy and beauty of her style, which thus commends 
to pure and innocent minds certain doctrines that, 
broadly stated, would repel and shock them. Were I 



GEORGE SAND. 



9 



one of George Sand's inveterate opponents, this, or 
something like it, is the ground I would take up. I 
would say : " The welfare of the human family demands 
that a marriage, legally made, shall never be questioned 
or undone. Marriage is not a union depending on love 
or congeniality, or any such condition. It is just as 
sacred when made for money, or for ambition, or for 
lust of the flesh, or for any other purpose, however ig- 
noble and base, as when contracted in the spirit of the 
purest mutual love. Here is a woman of great power 
and daring genius, who says that the essential condition 
of marriage is love and natural fitness ; that a legal 
union of man and woman without this is no marriage at 
all, but a detestable and disgusting sin. Now, the more 
delicately, modestly, plausibly she can put this revolu- 
tionary and pernicious doctrine, the more dangerous she 
becomes, and the more earnestly we ought to denounce 
her." This was, in fact, what a great many persons did 
say ; and the protest was at least consistent and logical. 

But horror is an emotion which cannot long live on 
the old fuel, and even the world of English Philistinism 
soon ceased to regard George Sand as a mere monster. 
Any one now taking up " Indiana," for example, would 
perhaps find it not quite easy to understand how the 
book produced such an effect. Our novel-writing women 
of to-day commonly feed us on more fiery stuff than this. 
Not to speak of such accomplished artists in impurity as 
the lady who calls herself Ouida, and one or two others 
of the same school, we have young women, only just pro- 
moted from pantalettes, who can throw you off such glow- 
ing chapters of passion and young desire as would make 
the rhapsodies of "Indiana" seem very feeble milk-and- 
water brewage by comparison. Indeed, except for some 



IO GEORGE SAND. 

of the descriptions in the opening chapters, I fail to see 
any extraordinary merit in " Indiana " ; and toward the 
end it seems to me to grow verbose, weak, and tiresome. 
" Leone Leoni " opens with one of the finest dramatic 
outbursts of emotion known to the literature of modern 
fiction ; but it soon wanders away into discursive weak- 
ness, and only just toward the close brightens up into a 
burst of lurid splendor. It is not those which I may call 
the questionable novels of George Sand, — the novels 
which were believed to illustrate in naked and appalling 
simplicity her doctrines and her life, — that will bear up 
lier fame through succeeding generations. If every one 
of the novels which thus in their time drew down the 
thun lers of Society's denunciation were to be swept into 
the wallet wherein Time, according to Shakespeare, car- 
ries scraps for oblivion, George Sand would still remain 
where she now is, — at the head of the French fiction of 
her day. It is true, as Goethe says, that " miracle- 
working pictures are rarely works of art." The books 
which make the hair of the respectable public stand on 
end are not often the works by which the fame of the ' 
author is preserved for posterity. 

It is a curious fact that, at the early time to which I 
have been alluding, little or nothing was known in Eng- 
land (or, I presume, in America) of the real life of 
Aurora Amandine Dupin, who had been pleased to call 
herself George Sand. People knew, or had heard, that 
she had separated from her husband, that she had writ- 
ten novels which depreciated the sanctity of legal mar- 
riage, and that she sometimes wore male costume in the 
streets. This was enough. In England, at least, we 
were ready to infer any enormity regarding a woman 
who was unsound on the legal marriage question, and 



GEORGE SAND. TI 

who did not wear petticoats. What would have been 
said had people then commonly known half the stories 
which were circulated in Paris, — half the extravagances 
into which a passionate soul, and the stimulus of sudden 
emancipation from restraint, had hurried the authoress 
of " Indiana " and " Lucrezia Floriani " ? For it must be 
owned that the life of that woman was, in its earlier 
years, a strange and wild phenomenon, hardly to be com- 
prehended, perhaps, by American or English natures. I 
have heard George Sand bitterly arraigned even by 
persons who protested that they were atvone with her as 
regards the early sentiments which used to excite such 
odium. I have heard her described by such as a sort of 
Lamia of literature and passion, — a creature who could 
seize some noble, generous, youthful heart, drain it of its 
love, its aspirations, its profoundest emotions, and then 
fling it, squeezed and lifeless, away. I have heard it 
declared that George Sand made " copy " of the fierce 
and passionate loves which she knew so well how to 
awaken and to foster ; that she distilled the life-blood of 
youth to obtain the mixture out of which she derived her 
inspiration. The charge so commonly (I think unjustly) 
made against Goethe, that he played with the girlish love 
of Bettina and of others in order to obtain a subject for 
literary dissection, is vehemently and deliberately urged 
in an aggravated form, — in many aggravated forms, — 
against George Sand. Where, such accusers ask, is that 
young poet, endowed with a lyrical genius rare indeed in 
the France of later days, — that young poet whose imag- 
ination was at once so daring and so subtle, — who might 
have been Beranger and Heine in one, and have risen to 
an atmosphere in which neither Beranger nor Heine ever 
floated ? Where is he, and what evil influence was it which 



12 GEORGE SAND. 

sapped the strength of his nature, corrupted his genius, 
and prepared for him a premature and shameful grave ? 
Where is that young musician, whose pure, tender, and 
lofty strains sound sweetly and sadly in the ears, as the 
very hynm and music of the Might-IIave-Been, — where 
is he now, and what was the seductive power which 
made a plaything of him and then flung him away? 
Here and there some man of stronger mould is pointed 
out as one who was at the first conquered, and then 
deceived and trifled with, but who ordered his stout heart 
to bear, and rose superior to the hour, and lived to 
retrieve his nature and make himself a name of respect ; 
but the others, of more sensitive and perhaps finer organ- 
izations, are only the more to be pitied because they were 
so terribly in earnest. Seldom, even in the literary his- 
tory of modern France, has there been a more strange 
and shocking episode than the publication by George 
Sand of the little book called " Elle et Lui," and the 
rejoinder to it by Paul de Musset, called " Lui et Elle." 
I can hardly be accused of straying into the regions of 
private scandal when I speak of two books which had a 
wide circulation, are still being read, and may be had, I 
presume, in any New York book-store where French lit- 
erature is sold. The former of the two books, u She 
and He," was a story, or something which purported to 
be a story, by George. Sand, telling of two ill-assorted 
beings whom fate had thrown together for awhile, and 
of whom the woman was all tenderness, love, patience, 
the man all egotism, selfishness, sensuousness, and eccen- 
tricity. The point of the whole business was to show 
how sublimely the woman suffered, and how wantonly 
the man flung happiness away. Had it been merely a 
piece of fiction, it must have been regarded by any 



GEORGE SAND. 



13 



healthy mind as a morbid, unwholesome, disagreeable 
production, — a sin of the highest aesthetic kind against 
true art, which must always, even in its pathos and its 
tragedy, leave on the mind exalted and delightful impres- 
sions. But every one in Paris at once hailed the story 
as a chapter of autobiography, as the author's vindication 
of one episode in her own career, — a vindication at the 
expense of a man who had gone down, ruined and lost, 
to an early grave. Therefore the brother of the dead 
man flung into literature a little book called " He and 
She," in which a story, substantially the same in its out- 
lines, is so told as exactly to reverse the conditions under 
which the verdict of public opinion was sought. Very 
curious indeed was the manner in which the same sub- 
stance of facts was made to present the two principal 
figures with complexions and characters so strangely 
altered. In the woman's book the woman was made the 
patient, loving, suffering victim ; in the man's reply this 
same woman was depicted as the most utterly selfish and 
depraved creature the human imagination could conceive. 
Even if one had no other means whatever of forming an 
estimate of the character of George Sand," it would be 
hardly possible to accept as her likeness the hideous pic- 
ture sketched by Paul de Musset. No woman, I am glad 
to believe, ever existed in real life so utterly selfish, base, 
and wicked as his bitter pen has drawn. I must say that 
the thing is very cleverly done. The picture is at least 
consistent with itself. As a character in romance it might 
be pronounced original, bold, brilliant, and, in an artistic 
sense, quite natural. There is something thoroughly 
French in the easy and delicate force of the final touch 
with which de Musset dismisses his hideous subject. 
Having sketched this woman in tints that seem to flame 



H 



GEORGE SAND. 



across the eyes of the reader, — having described with 
wonderful realism and power her affectation, her deceit, 
her reckless caprices, her base, and cruel coquetries, 
her devouring wantonness, her soul-destroying arts, her 
unutterable selfishness and egotism, — having, to use a 
vulgar phrase, " turned her inside out," and told her 
story backwards, — the author calmly explains that the 
hero of the narrative in his dying hour called his brother 
to his bedside, and enjoined him, if occasion should ever 
arise, if the partner of his sin should ever calumniate 
him in his grave, to vindicate his memory, and avenge 
the treason practised upon him. " Of course," adds the 
narrator, " the brother made the promise, — and I have 
since heard that he has kept his word." I can hardly 
hope to convey to the reader any adequate idea of the 
effect produced on the mind by these few simple words 
of compressed, whispered hatred and triumph, closing a 
philippic, or a revelation, or a libel of such extraordinary 
bitterness and ferocity. The whole episode is, I believe 
and earnestly hope, without precedent or imitation in 
literary controversy. Never, that I know of, has a living 
woman been publicly exhibited to the world in a por- 
traiture so hideous as that which Paul de Musset drew 
of George Sand. Never, that I know of, has any woman 
gone so near to deserving and justifying such a measure 
of retaliation. 

For if it be assumed, — and I suppose it never has been 
disputed, — that in writing u Elle et Lui" George Sand 
meant to describe herself and Alfred de Musset, it is hard 
to conceive of any sin against taste and feeling, — against 
art and morals, — more flagrant than such a publication. 
The practice, to which French writers are so much ad- 
dicted, of making " copy " of the private lives, charac- 



GEORGE SAND. 15 

ters, and relationships of themselves and their friends, 
seems to me in all cases utterly detestable. Lamartine's 
sins of this kind were grievous and glaring ; but were 
they tfgd as scarlet, they would seem whiter than snow 
when compared with the lurid monstrosity of George 
Sand's assault on the memory of the dead poet who was 
once her favorite. The whole affair, indeed, is so unlike 
anything which could occur in America or in England, 
that we can hardly find any canons by which to try it, or 
any standard of punishment by which to regulate its cen- 
sure. I allude to it now because it is the only substan- 
tial evidence I know of which does fairly seem to justify 
the worst of the accusations brought against George Sand ; 
and I do not think it right, when writing for grown men 
and women, who are supposed to have sense and judg- 
ment, to affect not to know that such accusations are 
made, or to pretend to think that it would be proper not 
to allude to them. They have been put forward, replied 
to, urged again, made the theme of all manner of contro- 
versy in scores of French and in some English publica- 
tions. Pray let it be distinctly understood that I am not 
entering into any criticism of the morality of any part of 
George Sand's private life. With that we have nothing 
here to do. I am now dealing with the question, fairly 
belonging to public controversy, whether the great artist 
did not deliberately deal with human hearts as the painter 
of old is said to have done with a purchased slave, — in- 
flicting torture in order the better to learn how to depict 
the struggles and contortions of mortal agony. In an- 
swer to such a question I can only point to " Lucrezia 
Floriani " and to " Elle et Lui," and say that unless the 
universal opinion of qualified critics be wrong, these books, 
and others too, owe their piquancy and their dramatic 



1 6 GEORGE SAND. 

force to the anatomization of dead passions and discarded 
lovers. We have all laughed over the pedantic surgeon in 
Moliere's " Malade Imaginaire," who invites his fiancee, 
as a delightful treat, to see him dissect the body of a 
woman. I am afraid that George Saud did sometime? 
invite an admiring public to an exhibition yet mort 
ghastly and revolting, — the dissection of the heart of & 
dead lover. 

But, in truth, Ave shall never judge George Sand and 
her writings at all, if we insist on criticising them from 
any point of view set up by the proprieties or even tha 
moralities of Old England or New England. When the 
passionate young woman, — in whose veins ran the wild 
blood of Marshal Saxe, — found herself surrendered by 
legality and prescription to a marriage bond against which 
her soul revolted, society seemed for her to have resolved 
itself into its original elements. Its conventionalities and 
traditions contained nothing which she held herself bound 
to respect. The world was not her friend, nor the world's 
law. By one great decisive step she sundered herself 
forever from the bonds of what we call " society." She 
had shaken the dust of convention from her feet ; the 
world was all before her where to choose. No crea- 
ture on earth is so absolutely free as the Frenchwoman 
who has broken with society. There, then, stood this 
daring young woman, on the threshold of a new, fresh, 
and illimitable world ; a young woman , gifted with 
genius such as our later years have rarely seen, and 
blessed or cursed with a nature so strangely uniting the 
most characteristic qualities of man and woman, as to be 
in itself quite unparalleled and unique. Just think of 
it, — try to think of it ! Society and the world had no 
longer any laws which she recognized. Nothing was 



GEORGE SAND. ij 

sacred ; nothing was settled. She had to evolve from her 
own heart and brain her own law of life. What wonder 
if she made some sad mistakes? Nay, is it not rather a 
theme for wonder and admiration that she did somehow 
come right at last? I know of no one who seems to me 
to have been open at once to the temptations of woman's 
nature and man's nature, except this George Sand. Her 
soul, — her brain, — her style may be described, from one 
point of view, as exuberantly and splendidly feminine ; 
yet no other woman has ever shown the same power of 
understanding, and entering into the nature of a man. If 
Balzac is the only man who has ever thoroughly mastered 
the mysteries of a woman's heart, George Sand is the 
only woman, so far as I know, who has ever shown that 
she could feel as a man can feel. I have read stray pas- 
sages in her novels which I would confidently submit to 
the criticism of any intelligent men unacquainted with 
the text, convinced that they would declare that only a 
man could have thus analyzed the emotions of manhood. 
I have in my mind, just now especially, a passage in the 
novel " Piccinino" which, were the authorship unknown, 
would, I am satisfied, secure the decision of a jury of lit- 
erary experts that the author must be a man. Now this 
gift of entire appreciation of the feelings of a different 
sex or race is, I take it, one of the rarest and highest 
dramatic qualities. Especially is it difficult for a woman, 
as our social life goes, to enter into the feelings of a man. 
While men and women alike admit the accuracy of cer- 
tain pictures of women drawn by such artists as Cer- 
vantes, Moliere, Balzac, and Thackeray, there are few 
women, — indeed, perhaps there are no women but one, — 
by whom a man has been so painted as to challenge and 
compel the recognition and acknowledgment of men. In 



18 ' GEORGE SAND. 

" The Galaxy," some months ago, I wrote of a great 
Englishwoman, the authoress of " Romola," and I ex- 
pressed my conviction that on the Avhole she is entitled to 
higher rank, as a novelist, than even the authoress of 
" Consuelo." Many, very many men and women, for 
whose judgment I have the highest respect, differed 
from me in this opinion. I still hold it, nevertheless ; 
but I freely admit that George Eliot has nothing like the 
dramatic insight which enables George Sand to enter into 
the feelings and experiences of a man. I go so far as to 
say that, having some knowledge of the literature of 
fiction in most countries, I am not aware of the existence 
of any woman but this one, who could draw a real, living, 
struggling, passion-tortured man. All other novelists of 
George Sand's sex, — even including Charlotte Bronte, — 
draw only what I may call " women's men." If ever the 
two natures could be united in one form, — if ever a 
single human being could have the soul of man and the 
soul of woman at once, — George Sand might be de- 
scribed as that physical and psychological phenomenon. 
Now the point to which I wish to direct attention, is the 
peculiarity of the temptation to which a nature such as this 
was necessarily exposed at every turn when, free of all re- 
straint and a rebel against all conventionality, it confronted 
the world and the world's law, and stood up, itself alone, 
against the domination of custom and the majesty of tra- 
dition. I claim, then, that when we have taken all these 
considerations into account, we are bound to admit that 
Aurora Dudevant deserves the generous recognition of 
the world for the use which she made of her splendid 
gifts. Her influence on French literature has been, on 
the whole, a purifying and strengthening power. The 
cynicism, the recklessness, the wanton, licentious disre- 



GEORGE SAND. 



r 9 



gard of any manner of principle, the debasing parade of 
disbelief in any higher purpose or nobler restraint, which 
are the shame and curse of modern French fiction, find 
no sanction in the pages of George Sand. I remember 
no passage in her works which gives the slightest encour- 
agement to the " nothing new, and nothing true, and it 
don't signify " code of ethics which has been so much in 
fashion of late years. I find nothing in George Sand 
which does not do homage to the existence of a principle 
and a law in everything. This daring woman, who broke 
with society so early and so conspicuously, has always in- 
sisted, through every illustration, character, and catas- 
trophe in her books, that the one only reality, the one only 
thing that can endure, is the rule of right and of virtue. 
Nor has she ever, that I can recollect, fallen into the en- 
feebling and sentimental theory so commonly expressed in 
the works of Victor Hugo, that the vague abstraction 
society is always to bear the blame of the faults commit- 
ted by the individual man or woman. Of all persons in 
the world, Aurora Dudevant might be supposed most likely 
to adopt this easy and complacent theory as her guiding 
principle. She had every excuse, every reason for en- 
deavoring to preach up the doctrine that our errors are 
society's and our virtues our own. But I am not aware 
that she ever taught any lesson save the lesson that men 
and women must endeavor to be heroes and heroines for 
themselves, heroes and heroines though all the world else 
were craven, and weak, and selfish, and unprincipled. 
Even that wretched and lamentable " Elle et Lui" affair, 
utterly inexcusable as it is when we read between the lines 
its secret history, has, at least, the merit of being an earn- 
est and powerful protest against the egotistical and debas- 
ing indulgence of moral weaknesses and eccentricities 



20 GEORGE SAND.' 

which mean and vulgar minds are apt to regard as the 
privilege of genius. " Stand upon your own ground ; be 
your own ruler ; look to yourself, not to your stars, for 
your failure or success ; always make your standard a 
lofty ideal, and try persistently to reach it, though all the 
temptations of earth, and all the power of darkness strive 
against you " — this, and nothing else, if I have read her 
books rightly, is the moral taught by George Sand. She 
may be wrong in her principle sometimes, but, at least, 
she always has a principle. She has a profound and gen- 
erous faith in the possibilities of human nature ; in the 
capacity of man's heart for purity, self-sacrifice, and self- 
redemption. Indeed, so far is she from holding counsel 
with wilful weakness or sin, that I think she sometimes 
falls into the noble error of painting her heroes as too 
glorious in their triumph over temptation, in their subju- 
gation of every passion and interest to the dictates of duty 
and of honor. Take, for instance, that extraordinary 
book which has just been given to the American public 
in Miss Virginia Vaughan's excellent translation, " Mau- 
prat." If I understand that magnificent romance at all, 
its purport is to prove that no human nature is ever 
plunged into temptation beyond its own strength to resist, 
provided that it really wills resistance ; that no character 
is irretrievable, no error inexpiable, where there is sincere 
resolve to expiate, and longing desire to retrieve. Take, 
again, that exquisite little story, " La Derniere Alclini" ; 
I do not know where one could find a finer illustration of 
the entire sacrifice of man's natural impulse, passion, in- 
terest, to what might almost be called an abstract idea of 
honor and principle. I have never read this little story 
without wondering how many men one ever has known 
who, placed in the same situation as that of Nello, the 



GEORGE SAND. 21 

hero, would have done the same thing ; and yet so simply 
and naturally are the characters wrought out, and the in- 
cidents described, that the idea of pompous, dramatic self- 
sacrifice never enters the mind of the reader, and it seems 
to him that Nello could not do otherwise than as he is 
doing. I speak of these two stories particularly, because 
in both of them there is a good deal of the world and the 
flesh ; that is, both are stories of strong human passion 
and temptation. Many of George Sand's novels, the 
shorter ones especially, are as absolutely pure in moral 
tone, as entirely free from even a taint or suggestion of 
impurity, as they are perfect in style. Now, if we cannot 
help knowing that much of this great woman's life was far 
from being irreproachable, are we not bound to give her 
all the fuller credit, because her genius, at least, kept so 
far the whiteness of its soul? Revolutions are not to be 
made with rose-water ; you cannot have omelettes without 
breaking of eggs. I am afraid that great social revolu- 
tionists are not often creatures of the most pure and per- 
fect nature. It is not to patient Griselda you must look 
for any protest against .even the uttermost tyranny of so- 
cial conventions. One thing I think may, at least, be 
admitted as part of George Sand's vindication, — that the 
marriage system in France is the most debased and debas- 
ing institution existing in civilized society, now that the 
buying and selling of slaves has ceased to be a tolerated 
system. I hold that the most ardent advocates of the 
irrevocable endurance of the marriage bond are bound, by 
their very principles, to admit that, in protesting against 
the so-called marriage system of France, George Sand 
stood on the side of purity and right. Assuredly, she 
often went into extravagances in the other direction. It 
seems to be the fate of all French reformers to rush sud« 



22 GEORGE SAND. 

denly to extremes ; and we must remember that George 
Sand was not a Bristol Quakeress, or a Boston transcend- 
entalism but a passionate Frenchwoman, the descendant 
of one of the maddest votaries of love and war who ever 
stormed across the stage of European history. 

Regarding George Sand, then, as an influcnoe in litera- 
ture, and on society, I claim for her at least four great 
and special merits : First, she insisted on calling public 
attention to the true principle of marriage ; that is to say, 
she put the question as it had not been put before. Of 
course, the fundamental principle she would have enforced 
is always being urged more or less feebly, more or less 
sincerely ; but she made it her own question, and illumin- 
ated it by the fervid, fierce rays of her genius and her 
passion. Secondly, her works are an exposition of the 
tremendous reality of the feelings which people who call 
themselves practical are apt to regard with indifference or 
contempt as mere sentiments. In the long run, the pas- 
sions decide the life-question one Avay or the other. They 
are the tide which, as you know or do not know how to 
use it, will either turn your mill and float your boat, or 
drown your fields and sweep away your dwellings. Life 
and society receive no impulse and no direction from the 
influences out of which the novels of Dickens, or even of 
Thackeray, are made up. These are but pleasant or ten- 
der toying with the playthings and puppets of existence. 
George Sand constrains us to look at the realities through 
the medium of her fiction. Thirdly, she insists that man 
can and shall make his own career ; not whine to the 
stars, and rail out against the powers above, when he has 
weakly or wantonly marred his own destiny. Fourthly, 
— and this ought not to be considered her least service to 
the literature of her country, — she has tried to teach 



GEORGE SAND. 23 

people to look at Nature with their own eyes, and to invite 
the true love of her to flow into their hearts. The great 
service -which Buskin, with all his eccentricities and ex- 
travagances, has rendered to English-speaking peoples by 
teaching them to use their own eyes when they look at 
clouds, and waters, and grasses, and hills, George Sand 
has rendered to France. 

I hold that these are virtues and services which 
ought to outweigh even very grave personal and 
artistic errors. We often hear that this or that great 
poet or romancist has painted men as they are ; this 
other as they ought to be. I think George Sand paints 
men as they are, and also not merely as they ought to be, 
but as they can be. The sum of the lesson taught by 
her books is one of confidence in man's possibilities, and 
hope in his steady progress. At the same time she is 
entirely practical in her faith and her aspirations. She 
never expects that the trees are to grow up into the 
heavens, that men and women are to be other than men 
and women. She does not want them to be other ; she 
finds the springs and sources of their social regeneration 
in the fact that they are just what they are, to begin 
with. I am afraid some of the ladies who seem to base 
their scheme of woman's emancipation and equality on the 
assumption that, by some development of time or 
process of schooling, a condition of things is to be 
brought about where difference of sex is no longer to be 
a disturbing power, will find small comfort or encourage- 
ment in the writings of George Sand. She deals in 
realities altogether ; the realities of life, even when they 
are such as to shallow minds may seem mere sentiments 
and ecstacies ; the realities of society, of suffering, of 
passion, of inanimate nature. There is in her nothing 



24 



GEORGE SAND. 



unmeaning, nothing untrue ; there is in her much error, 
doubtless, but no sham. 

I believe George Sand is growing into a quiet and 
beautiful old age. After a life of storm and stress, a life 
which, metaphorically at least, was " worn by war and 
passion," her closing years seem likely to be gilded with 
the calm glory of an autumnal sunset. One is glad to 
think of her thus happy and peaceful, accepting so 
tranquilly the reality of old age, still laboring with her 
unwearied pen, still delighting in books, and landscapes, 
and friends, and work. The world can well afford to 
forget as soon as possible her literary and other errors. 
Of the vast mass of romances, stories, plays, sketches, 
criticisms, pamphlets, political articles, even, it is said, 
ministerial manifestoes of republican days, which she 
poured out, only a few comparatively will perhaps be 
always treasured by posterity ; but these will be enough 
to secure her a classic place. And she will not be 
remembered by her writings alone. Hers is probably 
the most powerful individuality displayed by any mod- 
ern Frenchwoman. The influence of Madame Roland 
was but a glittering unreality, that of Madame de 
Stael only a boudoir and coterie success, when com- 
pared with the power exercised over literature, human 
feeling, and social law, by the energy, the courage, the 
genius, even the very errors and extravagances of George 
Sand. 



GEORGE SAND'S NOYELS. 



I MAUPRAT. Translated by Virginia Vattghav. 
II. ANTONIA. Translated by Virginia Vaughan. 

III. MONSIEUR SYLVESTRE. Tratslated by Fbaxci? 

George Shaw. 

IV. THE SNOW MAN. Translated by Virginia. Vauo haw. 
V. THE MILLER OF ANGLBAULT. Translated by Mart 

E. Dewey. 

VI. MY SISTER JEANNIE. Translated by S. R. Crocker. 

A standard Library Edition, uniformly bound, in neat lQmo volumes. Each 
volume sold separately. Price $1.50. 



SOME NOTICES OF "MAUPRAT." 
"An admirable translation. As to ' Mauprat,' with which novel Roberta 
Brothers introduce the first of French novelists to the American public, if then, 
were any doubts as to George Sand's power, it would for ever set them at rest. 
. . . The object of the story is to show how, by her (Edmee's) noble nature, he 
(Mauprat) is subsequently transformed from a brute to a man ; hia sensual pas- 
sion to a pure and holy love." — Harper's Monthly. 

" The excellence of George Sand, as we understand it, lies in her comprehen- 
sion of the primitive elements of mankind. She has conquered her way into tha 
human heart, and whether it is at peace or at war, is the same to her ; for she is 
mistress of all its moods. No woman before ever painted the passions aud the 
emotions with such force and fidelity, and with such consummate art. Whatever 
else she may be, she is always an artist. . . . Love is the key-note of ' Mauprat.' 
— love, and what it can accomplish in taming an otherwise untamable spirit. 
The hero, Bernard Mauprat, grows up with his uncles, who are practically ban- 
dits, as was not uncommon with men of their class, in the provinces, before the 
breaking out of the French Revolution. He is a young savage, of whom the best 
that can be said is, that he is only less wicked than his relatives, because he has 
somewhere within him a sense of generosity and honor, to which they are entire 
strangers. To sting this sense into activity, to detect the makings of a man in this 
brute, to make this brute into a man, is the difficult problem, which is worked 
out by love, — the love of Bernard for his cousin Edmee, and hers for him, — the 
love of two strong, passionate, noble natures, locked in a life-and-death struggle, 
in which the man is finally overcome by the unconquerable strength of woman- 
hood. Only a great writer could have described such a struggle, and only a great 
artist could have kept it within allowable limits. This George Sand has done, wo 
think ; for her portrait of Bernard is vigorous without being coarse, and her situ- 
ations are strong without being dangerous. Such, at least, is the impression we 
have received from reading ' Mauprat,' which, besides being an admirable study 
of character, is also a fine picture of French provincial life and manners." — Put- 
nam's Monthly. 

"Roberts Brothers propose to publish a series of translations of George 
Band's better novels. We can hardly say that all are worth appearing in English ; 
but it is certain that the ' better ' list will comprise a good many which are worth 
translating, and among these is 'Mauprat,' — though by no means the best of 
them. Written to show the possibility of constancy in man, a love inspired be- 
fore and continuing through marriage, it is itself a contradiction to a good many 
of the popular notions respecting the author, — who is generally supposed tc be 
as indifferent to the sanctities of the marriage relation as was her celebrated an- 
©ester, Augustus of Saxony. . . . The translation is admirable. It is seldom tha* 
One reads such good English in a work translated from any language. The Dew 
series is inaugurated in the best possible way, under the hands of Miss Vaughan. 
end we trust that she may have a great deal to do with its continuance. It is 
not every one who can read French who can write English so well." — Old and 
New. 

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FAMOUS WOMEN SERIES. 



EMILY BRONTE. 

By A. MARY F. ROBINSON. 
One vol. 16mo. Cloth. Price, $1.00. 

" Miss Robinson has written a fascinating biography. . . . Emily Bronte is 
interesting, not because she wrote ' Withering Heights,' but because of her 
brave, baffled, human life, so lonely, so full of pain, but with a great hope shining 
beyond all the darkness, and a passionate defiance in bearing more than the 
burdens that were laid upon her. The story of the three sisters is infinitely sad, 
but it is the ennobling sadness that belongs to large natures cramped and striving 
for freedom to heroic, almost desperate, work, with little or no result. The author 
of this intensely interesting, sympathetic, and eloquent biography, is a young lady 
and a poet, to whom a place is given in a recent anthology of living English poets, 
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"Miss Robinson had many excellent qualifications for the task she has per- 
formed in this little volume, among which may be named, an enthusiastic interest 
in her subject and a real sympathy with Emily Bronte's sad and heroic life. 'To 
represent her as she was,' says Miss Robinson, ' would be her noblest and most 
fitting monument.' . . . Emily Bronte here becomes well known to us and, in one 
sense, this should be praise enough for any biography.'' — New York Times. 

"The biographer who finds such material before him as the lives and characters 
of the Bronte family need have no anxiety as to the interest of his work. Char- 
acters not only strong but so uniquely strong, genius so supreme, misfortunes so 
overwhelming, set in its scenery so forlornly picturesque, could not fail to attract 
all readers, if told even in the most prosaic language. When we add to this, that 
Mi<s Robinson has told their story ?iot in prosaic language, but with a literary 
style exhibiting all the qualities essential to good biography, our readers will 
understand that this life of Emily Bronte is not only as interesting as a novel, but 
a great deal more interesting than most novels. As it presents most vividly a 
general picture of the family, there seems hardly a reason for giving it Emily's name 
alone, except perhaps for the masterly chapters on ' Wuthering Heights,' which 
the reader will find a grateful condensation of the best in that powerful but some- 
what forbidding story. We knew of no point in the Bronte history — their genius, 
their surroundings, their faults, their happiness, their misery, their love and friend- 
ships, their peculiarities, their power, their gentleness, their patience, their pride, 
— which Miss Robinson has not touched upon with conscientiousness and sym- 
pathy." — The Critic. 

" ' Emily Bronte ' is the second of the ' Famous Women Series,' which Roberts 
Brothers, Boston, propose to publish, and of which ' George Eliot ' was the initial 
volume. Not the least remarkable of a very remarkable family, the personage 
whose life is here written, possesses a peculiar interest to all who are at all familiar 
with the sad and singular history of herself and her sister Charlotte. That the 
author, Miss A. Mary F. Robinson, has done her work with minute fidelity to 
facts as well as affectionate devotion to the subject of her sketch, is plainly to be 
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three poems in one volume. 

" There are no books for boys like these poems by Sir Walter 
Scott. Every boy likes them, if they are not put into his hands 
too late. They surpass everything for boy reading." — Ralph 
Waldo Emerson. 

Oliver Goldsmith's "The Vicar of Wakefield." 
With Illustrations by Mulready. 

Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe." With Illustrations by 
Stothard. 

Bernardin de Saint- Pierre's "Paul and Virginia." 
With Illustrations by Lalauze. 

Southey's "Life of Nelson." With Illustrations by 
Birket Foster. 

Voltaire's "Life of Charles the Twelfth." With 
Maps and Portraits. 

Maria Edgeworth's "Classic Tales." With a bio- 
graphical Sketch by Grace A. Oliver. 

Lord Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome." With 
a Biographical Sketch and Illustrations. 

Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Progress." With all of the origi- 
nal Illustrations in fac-simile. 

Classic Heroic Ballads. Edited by the Editor of 
"Quiet Hours." 

Classic Tales. By Anna Letitia Barbauld. With a 
Biographical Sketch by Grace A. Oliver. 

Classic Tales. By Ann and Jane Taylor. With a 
Biographical Sketch by Grace A. Oliver. 

AND OTHERS. 



MESSES. KOBEKTS BEOTHEES' PUBLICATIONS. 

JFamous SHomen g>erfes. 
GEORGE ELIOT. 

By MATHILDE BLIND. 
One vol. i6mo. Cloth. Price, $1.00. 



11 Messrs. Roberts Brothers begin a series of Biographies of Famous 
Women with a life of George Eliot, by Mathilde Blind. The idea of the 
series is an excellent one, and the reputation of its publishers is a guarantee 
for its adequate execution. This book contains about three hundred pages in 
open type, and not xmly collects and condenses the main facts that are known 
in regard to the history of George Eliot, but supplies other material from 
personal research. It is agreeably written, and with a good idea of propor- 
tion in a memoir of its size. The critical study of its subject's works, which 
is made in the order of their appearance, is particularly well done. In fact, 
good taste and good judgment pervade the memoir throughout." — Saturday 
Evening- Gazette. 

" Miss Blind's little book is written with admirable good taste and judg- 
ment, and with notable self-restraint. It does not weary the reader with 
critical discursiveness, nor with attempts to search out high-flown meanings 
and recondite oracles in the plain 'yea' and ' nay ' of life. It is a graceful 
and unpretentious little biography, and tells all that need be told concerning 
one of the greatest writers of the time. It is a deeply interesting if not 
fascinating woman whom Miss Blind presents," says the New York 
Tribune. 

"Miss Blind's little biographical study of George Eliot is written with 
sympathy and good taste, and is very welcome. It gives us a graphic if not 
elaborate sketch of the personality and development of the great novelist, is 
particularly full and authentic concerning her earlier years, tells enough of 
the leading motives in her work to give the general reader a lucid idea of the 
true drift and purpose of her art, and analyzes carefully her various writings, 
with no attempt at profound criticism or fine writing, but with appreciation, 
insight, and a clear grasp of those underlying psychological principles which 
are so closely interwoven in every production that came from her pen." — 
Traveller. 

" The lives of few great writers have attracted more curiosity and specula- 
tion than that of George Eliot. Had she only lived earlier in the century 
she might easily have become the centre of a mythos. As it is, many of the 
anecdotes commonly repeated about her are made up largely of fable. It is, 
therefore, well, before it is too late, to reduce the true story of her career to 
the lowest terms, and this service has been well done by the author of the 
present volume." — Philadelphia Press. 

Sold by all booksellers, or mailed, post-paid, on receipt of 
price, by the publishers, 

ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston. 



A SELECTION FROM 

Messrs. ROBERTS BROTHERS' 

Latest New Publications. 



FIGURES OF THE PAST. From the Leaves of Old 

Journals. By Josiah Quincy (Class of 1821, Harvard 

College). i6mo. Price, $1.50 

" There are chapters on life in the Academy at Andover, on Harvard Sixty Years 
Ago, on Commencement Day in 1S21, the year of the author's graduation, and on 
visits to and talks with John Adams, with reminiscences of Lafayette, Judge Story, 
John Randolph, Jackson and other eminent persons, and sketches of old Washington 
and old Boston society. The kindly pen of the author is never dipped in gall — he 
remembers the pleasing aspects of character, and his stories and anecdotes are told in 
the best of humor and leave no sting. The book is of a kind which we are not likely 
to have again, for the men of Mr. Quincy's generation, those at least who had his 
social opportunities, are nearly all gone. These pictures of old social and political 
conditions are especially suggestive as reminding us that a single life, only lately 
closed, linked us with days, events and men that were a part of our early history and 
appear remote because of the multitude of changes that have transformed society in 
the interval." — Boston Journal. 

WHIST, OR BUMBLEPUPPY? By Pembridge. 

From the Second London Edition. i6mo. Cloth. Price, .50 

Definition of Bumblepuppy — Bumblepuppy is persisting to play whist, either 
in utter ignorance of all its known principles, or in defiance of them, or both. 

"'Whist, or Bumblepuppy?' is one of the most entertaining, and at the same 
time one of the soundest books on whist ever written. Its drollery may blind some 
readers to the value of its advice; no man who knows anything about whist, how- 
ever, will fail to read h; with interest, and few will fail to read it with advantage. 
Upon the ordinary rules of whist, Pembridge supplies much sensible and thor- 
oughly amusing comment. The best player in the world may gain from his ob- 
servations, and a mediocre player can scarcely find a better counsellor. There is 
scarcely an opinion expressed with which we do not coincide." — London Sunday 
Tzmes. 



RECOLLECTIONS OF DANTE GABRIEL ROS- 

SETTI. By T. Hall Caine. With Portrait. One vol. 

8vo. Cloth, gilt. Price, $3.00 

"Mr.Caine's 'Recollections of Rossetti' throws light upon many events in Ros- 

setti's life over which there hung a veil of mystery A book that must 

survive." — London Athenceum. 



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PHYLLIS BROWNE. A Story. By Flora L. Shaw. 
Author of "Castle Blair" and "Hector." i6mo. Cloth. 
Illustrated. Price, $1.00 

" ' Castle Blair ' and ' Hector ' are such good stories that a third, by the same 
author, Flora L. Shaw, will be equally welcomed. ' Hector' was one of the most 
charming books ever written about a boy. ' Phyllis Browne ' is the new story. She 
is evidently the author's ideal girl, as Hector was her ideal boy, and a noble, splendid 
girl she is. Yet the book is not a child's book; it is about children, but not for them. 
The story is far more interesting than most novels are, and far more exciting. The 
rash generosity of the children is beautiful ; their free, trustful lives are noble and 
sweet ; but when they undertake to right social wrongs, and gallantly set their brave 
hearts and childish inexperience against the established wrongs of society, they come 
to grief, but in no commonplace way. Their dangers are as unusual and on as large 
a scale as their characters and courage are. The book is full of tender and loving 
things ; it makes the heart larger, and brings back the splendid dreams of one's own 
youth," says the Boston correspondent of the Worcester Spy. 



THE MARQUIS OF CARABAS. A Romance. By 
Harriet Prescott Spofford, author of "The Amber 
Gods," "The Thief in the Night," etc. i6mo. Cloth. Price, $1.00 

" This is the latest offering of the author of ' The Amber Gods,' and it is as odd as 
striking, and as impressive in its shadowy implication as anything she has ever 
written. Handled differently, the incidents would seem theatrical; as told by Mrs. 
Spofford, the story is like the vivid passages of a drama from which, once seen, you 
cannot escape. Pleasant or unpleasant they force themselves upon the consideration 
and lay hold of the imagination. So it is with ' The Marquis of Carabas.' " — Chicago 
Inter-Ocean. , 

" 'The Marquis of Carabas,' by Harriet Prescott Spofford, is a work of unique 
quality, being really a poem in the guise of a prose novel. The thought is tense and 
sublimated, and the style glowing, musical and polished. There is abundant inven- 
tion in the story, and nothing of common-place and indolent imitation which in the 
case of ordinary raconteurs contributes so largely to swell the bulk of results. The 
narrative fascinates one, but the fascination is not of a stream flowing largely and 
naturally through the landscape ; it is rather that of silver bells, whose clear, finely 
modulated chimes touch the finer issues of feeling, but not without some obtrusive 
sense of study and premeditation." — Home Journal. 



LANDOR'S IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS. 

With a portrait. A new edition. 5 volumes. i6mo. 

Cloth. Oxford style. Price, $5.00 

Imitation half calf, 6.25 



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PEARLS OF THE FAITH ; or, Islam's Rosary ; being 
the "Ninety-nine Beautiful Names of Allah." By 
Edwin Arnold. i6mo. Cloth. Uniform with "The 
Light of Asia." Price, $1.00 

"Mr. Edwin Arnold has finished his Oriental trilogy. The first part is 'The 
Light of Asia.' The second part is 'The Indian Song of Songs.' The trilogy is 
completed by ' Pearlsofthe Faith,' in which the poet tells the beads of a pious Moslem. 
The Mohammedan has a chaplet of three strings, each string containing 33 beads, 
each bead representing one of the 'Ninety-nine beautiful names of Allah.' These 
short poems have no connection ;. they vary in measure, but are all simple and without 
a touch of obscurity. All the legends and instructions inculcate the gentle virtues 
that make life lovely — courtesy, humility, hospitality, care for the poor and the ill, 
kindness to dumb animals, perfect manners in social intercourse. Many of the poems 
are suitable for Christian Sunday-schools. . . . The view of Mohammedanism 
given by these poems is very pleasant ; the precepts for life here are sweet and noble ; 
the promises for heaven are definite ; they appeal directly to the love of what is 
known as pleasure in this life, and that must be renounced in this life, but in the next 
it may be enjoyed to the uttermost without evil consequences." — Boston Daily 
A dvertiser. 

ART AND NATURE IN ITALY. By Eugene Ben- 
son. i6mo. Cloth. Price, $1.00 

"Mr. Benson's long residence in that country has operated to imbue his mind with 
the spirit of the region. He treats con amore of its art in its historical and in its 
modern aspects, and he presents its scenes of nature in their most fascinating form. 
Mr. Benson is not only one of the most appreciative of students and observers, but 
he has a rare grace of manner as well. He writes little of late, but his productions 
are always acceptable to cultivated people." — Saturday Evening Gazette. 

"This book is a record of impressions and reflections on art and nature in Italy. 
The great beauty and the historic associations of the country are set forth in very 
pleasing language by one who fully appreciates them. He particularly describes 
those portions of that beautiful land in which its most distinguished artists have 
lived, showing how its natural features, its enchanting scenery, must have had a 
molding influence upon their tastes and their works._ His estimates of art and artists 
and his criticisms are, in the main, just and satisfactory." — Western Christian 
Advocate. 

NORSE STORIES, RETOLD FROM THE EDDAS. 

By Hamilton W. Mabie. i6mo. Cloth. Price, . . $1.00 

"Is one of the most charming little books for children I have ever seen. The 
myths are splendidly told, and every household in America ought to have a copy of 
the book." — Prof. R. B. Anderson. 

"The old Norse stories bear being told again and again. Mr. Mabie keeps their 
freshness, fascination and simplicity in his new version of them, and one reads with 
nnabated pleasure of Odin's search for wisdom, of the wooing of Gerd, and of all 
the strange adventures of Thor, of the beautiful Balder, of the wicked Loke, and, 
best of all, of the new earth that was created after long years of darkness, in which 
there was no sun, no moon, no stars, no Asgard, no Hel, no Jotunheim; in which 
gods, giants, monsters and men were all dead — the earth upon which the gods look 
lovingly, upon which men are industrious and obedient, and know that the Ail-Father 
helps them." — Boston Daily Advertiser. 



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post-paid on receipt of advertised price. 

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THE WISDOM OF THE BRAHMIN. A Didactic 

Poem. Translated from the German of Friedrich Riick- 
ert. By Chas. T. Brooks. Six cantos. i6mo. Cloth, 
Price, $1.25 

"The Brahmin," says the translator, " is a poem of vast range, expressing the 
world-wisdom which the author had been for years storing up in his large heart, and 
evolving out of his creative soul." Says Dr. Beyer, in his Life of Ruckert: " 'The 
Wisdom of the Brahmin ' is a poetic house-treasure of which our nation may justly 
be proud. So much has been said and sung of late years of ' The Light of Asia,' the 
'Sympathy of Religions,' and the like, that the present seemed to be an auspicious 
moment to venture a volume of Ruckert's greatest work." 

" 'These twenty books are a sea of thoughts and contemplations full of Brahminic 
tranquility and German depth and fullness, in simple gnomes, sentences, epigrams, 
parables, fables and tales.' Gottsschall declares the work to be 'a poetic treasure of 
which the German nation may justly be proud.' The translator, speaking of his own 
experiences, says the poem has affected him as 'a sparkling flood of heart-searching 
and soul-lifting thought and sentiment, such as no other work within our knowledge 
has ever presented.' " — Home Journal. 



SOCRATES. The Apology and Crito of Plato, and the 
Phaedo of Plato. Uniform with "Marcus Aurelius," 
" Imitation of Christ, " etc. i8mo. Flexible cloth, red 
edges. Price, 50 cents each. Two series in one volume. 
Cloth, red edges. Price, 75 cents. 

" If, as is strongly asserted, there may be found in the writings of Plato all the 
wisdom and learning of the ancients, as well as the treasure-house from which all 
succeeding writers have borrowed their best ideas, then are these little books worth 
their weight in gold, for they contain some of the choicest gems to be found in the 
collected works of the famous Greek philosopher. They are companion volumes, 
the text being taken unabridged from Professor Jewett's revised translation of Plato. 
They tell the whole story of the trial, imprisonment and death of Socrates. The 
Apology gives the defence, the Crito relates the offer of escape, the Phasdo describes 
the last hours. The more studiously and the more frequently these books are read 
the more keen will be the appreciation of their intellectual and moral.excellence." — • 
Providence Journal. 



JEAN INGELOW'S NOVELS. Off the Skelligs; 
Fated to be Free; Sarah de Berenger; Don John. 
A new edition. 4 vols. i6mo. Imitation half calf. 
Price, $5.00 



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THE JEAN INGELOW BIRTHDAY BOOK. With 

red-line border and divisions, 12 illustrations and portrait. 

i6mo. Cloth, gilt and illuminated. Price, $1.00 

Full calf or morocco, $3.50 

"This is a dainty little volume having a selection from Jean Ingelow for each day 
of the year. The extracts are of both prose and verse. There are graceful illustra- 
tions for each month suited in subject to the season. The book will be v/elcomed by 
admirers of this writer and must prove a popular gift-book for the birthday season." — 
Chicago A dvance. 

"We have seen no more tasteful book this year than ' The Jean Ingelow Birthday 
Book,' which Messrs. Roberts Brothers publish. It is somewhat larger in form than 
are the birthday books with which the public is familiar, is printed on very fine paper, 
and has a page with the usual quotations and the usual blanks, the whole encircled 
with a carmine line border, the date of the days of the months being printed in the 
same color. The work is illustrated with handsome engravings, and has a steel- 
engraved portrait of Jean Ingelow. The binding is areal gem. _ Nothing could well 
be more attractive in the way of cloth ornament than is its combination of design and 
color." — Satzirday Evening Gazette. 



UNDER THE SUN. By Phil. Robinson, the new^ 

English Humorist. With a Preface by Edwin Arnold, 

author of "The Light of Asia." i6mo. Cloth. Price, #1.50 

This is a volume of essays, humorous and pathetic, of incidents, scenes, and 
objects grouped under the heads: Indian Sketches, The Indian Seasons, Unnatural 
History, Idle Hours under the Punkah. 

"Under the Sun," by Phil. Robinson, is one of the most delightful of recent 
books. The style is fascinating in its strength and picturesqueness, and there is now 
and then a delicious quaintness that recalls Charles Lamb. A volume such as this is 
rare in our day, when the art of essay writing is almost lost and forgotten. Fresh- 
ness, vigor, humor, pathos, graphic power, a keen love for nature, a gentle love for 
animals, and a pleasing originality are among the more charming characteristics of 
this work, which maybe read a^ain and again with renewed satisfaction. Its scenes 
are laid in India, and whether the author discourses of the elephant, the rhinoceros, 
some bird that has attracted his attention, a tree, or a flower; whether^ he describes 
an exciting hunt, or tells a marvellous story; whether he moralizes or gives free rein 
to his fancy, he is always brilliant, fascinating, vivacious and masterly. It is difficult 
to write of this remarkable book without superlatives ; but it is not too much to insist 
that it is impossible to exaggerate its peculiar merits, or to bestow too large a share of 
praise upon it. It is not a book for the few, but for the many, and all will find delight 
in its perusal." — Saturday Evening Gazette. 



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A LITTLE PILGRIM. Reprinted from Macmillan's 

Magazine. i6mo. Cloth. Red edges. Price, . . . . $ .75 

_ "An exquisitely written little sketch is found in that remarkable production, 'The 
Little Pilgrim,' which is just now attracting much attention both in Europe and 
America. It is highly imaginative in its scope, representing one of the world-worn 
and weary pilgrims of our earthly sphere as entering upon the delights of heaven 
after death. The picture of heaven is drawn with the rarest delicacy and refinement, 
and is in agreeable contrast in this respect to the material sketch of this future home 
furnished in Miss Stuart Phelps's well-remembered 'Gates Ajar.' The bunk will be 
abalm to the heart of many readers who are in accord with the faith of its author; 
and to others its reading will afford rare pleasure from the exceeding beauty and 
affecting simplicity of its almost perfect literary style." — Saturday Evening Gazette. 
" The life beyond the grave, when the short life in this world is ended, is to many 
a source of dread — to ail a mystery. 'A Little Pilgrim' has apparently solved it, 
and, indeed, it seems on reading this little book as if there were a great probability 
about it. A soft, gentle tone pervades its every sentence, and one cannot read it 
without feeling refreshed and strengthened." — The Alta California. 

THE GREAT EPICS OF MEDIEVAL GERMANY. 
An Outline of their Contents and History. By George 
Theodore Dippcld, Professor at Boston University and 
Wellesley College. i6mo. Cloth. Price, $i-5o 

Professor Francis J. Child, of Harvard College, says : " It is an excellent account 
of the chief German heroic poems of the Middle Ages, accompanied with spirited 
translations. It is a book which gives both a brief and popular, and also an accurate, 
account of this important section of literature, and will be very welcome here and at 
other colleges." 

"No student of modern literature, and above all no student who aims to under- 
stand the literary development of Europe in its fullest range, can leave this rich and 
ample world of early song unexplored. To ail such Professor Dippold's book will 
have the value of a trustworthy guide. . . . It has all the interest of a 

chapter in the growth of the human mind into comprehension of the universe and of 
itself, and it has the pervading charm of the vast realm of poetry through which it 
moves." — Chrisiia?i Union. 



MY HOUSEHOLD OF PETS. By Theophile Gautier. 
Translated from the French by Susan Coolidge. With 
illustrations by Frank Rogers. i6mo. Cloth. Price, . $1.25 

" This little book will interest lovers of animals, and the quaint style in which 
M. Gautier tells of the wisdom of his household pets will please every one. The 
translator, too, is happy in her work, for she has succeeded in rendering ihe text into 
English without loss cf the French tone, which makes it fascinating. These house- 
hold pets consisted of white and black cats, does, chameleons, Jizards, magpies, and 
horses, each of which has a character and story of its own. Illustrations and a pretty 
binding add to the attractions of the volume." — Worcester S/y. 

"The ease and elegance of Theophile Gautier's diction is wonderful, and the 
translator has preserved the charm of the French author with far more than the 
average fidelity. ' My Household of Pets ' is a book which can be read with pleasure 
by young and old. It is a charming volume. — St. Louis Spectator. 



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